His framing of where Skate sits in the market is the reason this piece exists. Skate is more grown up than Roblox and more laid back than Fortnite. Inside the game you can have fun and hang out with your friends, and you do not need a gun or anything to blow up to do it. That is rarer than it sounds, and it changes the brand opportunity completely.

This is Part 3 of the platform concentration series. In Part 2 I placed Skate in the top-left of the matrix: niche scale, very high cultural specificity. This week I want to make the affirmative case for why brand teams should consider that quadrant seriously, and what the first integrations are already telling us.

The Position Nobody Else Has

The positioning insight Hawley dropped is worth unpacking, because it identifies a gap the two dominant platforms have left uncovered.

Roblox is built for play that skews younger, even though the platform is desperately trying to age up (though it remains to be seen if their efforts bare fruit). Fortnite, despite its cultural curation, is fundamentally a shooter. Both platforms serve their audiences well. They also leave a space in the middle empty. Players who have aged out of Roblox and don’t want a combat-driven experience have, until recently, had no obvious next stop in immersive gaming.

Skate fills that gap from both directions. It functions as the intermediate step between Roblox and Fortnite for younger players growing into more sophisticated experiences, and as the off-ramp for Fortnite players who want a lower-intensity place to hang out with friends. The activity inside the game is rooted in something physical, something that exists in the real world, and something built around skill and self-expression rather than survival.

That positioning is the structural reason the brand opportunity in Skate behaves differently from the brand opportunity inside the two dominant platforms.

Previously released posts in this special series

Grounded in Everyday Life

The deeper reason Skate’s positioning matters for brand integration is that the in-game activities map directly to real-world habits.

Roblox and Fortnite, by design, transport players into invented worlds with invented physics, invented economies, and invented logic. Brand integrations inside those worlds have to play by the world’s rules. A real-world brand showing up in a fantasy game has to translate itself into the fantasy.

Skate works the opposite way. Players are skating in cities that feel like cities, past storefronts that feel like storefronts, in clothing and gear that the same person would buy in real life. The in-game footwear matters because real-world footwear matters in the culture. The boards matter because boards matter. The fashion matters because fashion is half the point.

This is the substrate brands have been looking for. An immersive game where brand integration does not require the brand to become something it isn’t. A Vans skate shoe in Skate is a Vans skate shoe. A Nike SB Dunk is a Nike SB Dunk. The fictional layer is minimal, and the everyday-life layer is the dominant frame.

The Nike SB Blueprint

The first proof point of this thesis is already live. From April 14 to May 5, 2026, EA ran a Nike SB Pop-Up Event in Skate, the most extensive brand collaboration the game has attempted to date.

The event delivered a Nike SB park takeover, a long-requested night-skating mode called Grom at Night, a series of challenges modeled on famous Nike SB skate videos, and a deep cosmetic catalog: the Nike SB Dunk Low, Dunk Low Pro, Dunk High, Zoom Blazer Mid, and over eight new footwear styles plus Nike SB hoodies, jorts, headwear, and bottoms. Players could earn select items by completing event challenges and purchase the rest from the in-game store.

The significant part of the Nike integration is not the cosmetics. It’s the structure. Nike is not parachuting into a fantasy game and asking players to suspend disbelief. The audience is already inside a skate experience where Nike SB is part of the cultural language. The integration meets players where they already are. That is exactly the authentic-fit dynamic Roblox and Fortnite struggle to manufacture, and it is the model for what comes next.

What Comes Next: Brands as Functional Roles

In my conversation with Hawley, one of the more compelling future directions the Skate team is exploring is in-game jobs. Players in Skate could take on roles that match the lived texture of a real city. One example currently being discussed: a delivery driver who brings packages to other players’ doorsteps.

Sit with that for a moment from a brand strategist’s perspective. If players can become delivery drivers in Skate, FedEx or UPS should be in the room before that mechanic ships. Every player who takes on the role becomes a moving FedEx or UPS billboard, in full uniform, doing the job the brand actually does, inside a city full of other players who see it dozens of times per session. That’s not a sponsored skin. That’s functional brand integration where the brand’s real-world category and the in-game role are the same thing.

The list extends quickly. A coffee shop run opens the door for Starbucks or Blue Bottle. A bike messenger gig invites cycling brands. A photo run for a magazine maps cleanly onto Thrasher. The principle is the same each time: the game’s everyday-life substrate gives brands a way to integrate as themselves, doing what they do in the real world, rather than as an awkward fantasy stand-in.

Skateboarding’s Concentric Circles

The other reason this opportunity is larger than the raw player numbers suggest is the cultural surface area of skateboarding itself.

Industry estimates put the global active skateboarding population at roughly 62 million people. That is a meaningful base on its own. It also dramatically undersells the audience for a brand integrating into skate culture, because skateboarding has been a cultural nucleus for fifty years with concentric circles of influence radiating outward into streetwear, music, fashion, art, film, and youth identity.

Louis Vuitton has put a skateboarder on its runways. Supreme built a billion-dollar brand on skate codes. Palace, Thrasher, Stüssy, Carhartt WIP, and Vans owe a meaningful share of their cultural relevance to skateboarding’s gravity. That radiating quality is why a brand entering Skate reaches dramatically more than the active participants. It reaches the streetwear consumer who has never touched a board. It reaches the fashion shopper who saw Vans Old Skools come back into style. It reaches the music fan whose favorite act references skate culture in its visuals. The audience is many multiples larger than the skater count, and it is the audience most brands actually want.

What the Data Says About Skate’s Audience

To pressure-test the concentric-circles argument, I recently ran a research pass on the global skateboarding fanbase using Elaris, an audience-intelligence platform. The fanbase segments cleanly into four core psychological personas. The more interesting finding for brand leaders sits in the cross-category cultural affinities of the largest segment.

The top 20 films and series this segment loves span Stranger Things, Rick and Morty, Star Wars, Breaking Bad, Naruto, The Office, The Vampire Diaries, Family Guy, Peaky Blinders, and The Flash. The breadth is the point. This is an audience with mainstream entertainment appetite across prestige drama, sitcom comfort food, anime, fantasy IP, and global phenomena.

The top 20 brands the same segment loves include Nike, Adidas, Vans, Gucci, Converse, Samsung, Nintendo, Volcom, Coca-Cola, Walmart, Google, and Target. Read that list again. Skate-native footwear, luxury fashion, consumer electronics, gaming hardware, beverages, fast food, and big-box retail all coexist as top-tier brand loves for the same audience.

This is the concentric-circles argument in data. The skateboarding fan is a mainstream entertainment consumer with broad brand affinities that span the entire consumer-spending landscape. The brand opportunity inside Skate is for far more than the obvious skate-adjacent brands. It is for anyone whose target audience overlaps with this profile, which is most of the Fortune 500.

What This Means for Brand Leaders in 2026

Skate is not a Roblox-scale platform, and it never will be. It also does not need to be. The case for putting real strategy behind a Skate integration rests on three factors that no other immersive game on the matrix combines.

First, the structural positioning gap. Skate sits between the two dominant platforms on tone, intensity, and life-stage, and that gap is genuinely empty everywhere else in immersive gaming today.

Second, the everyday-life substrate. The mechanics of Skate let brands integrate as themselves, doing the real-world thing they actually do, rather than as fantasy stand-ins translated through a foreign world’s rules.

Third, the cultural surface area of skateboarding itself. Concentric circles of streetwear, music, and fashion give even smaller-scale activations a reach that no Roblox awareness play can replicate, and Elaris’s data shows the audience profile extends across the full consumer-brand landscape.

The Nike SB pop-up event is the early proof. What the Skate team is contemplating with in-game jobs is the more interesting frontier, because that is where the brand category and the in-game function start to align in ways that do not exist anywhere else in immersive gaming today.

Next week closes the series with a deeper conversation with Pete Hawley, General Manager at EA overseeing Skate, on how he and the team are thinking about the brand opportunity, what they want from partners, and where the franchise goes from here. You don’t want to miss it.

Which brand category in your portfolio could integrate authentically into Skate’s everyday-life substrate, and which still depends on fantasy-world translation to land in Roblox or Fortnite? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining is the publication for marketing, brand, and strategy leaders navigating the intersection of gaming, technology, and entertainment. Subscribe to get next week’s closing interview with Pete Hawley, General Manager at EA overseeing the Skate franchise.

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Yet what Paramount’s move signals is that gaming has far greater importance than just delivering great games in isolation based on IP that already exists. It’s about acknowledging that games can be the source of new IP as well, while giving fans the ability to immerse themselves more deeply into all of the worlds of their favorite characters.

Structure Follows Strategy

By elevating games into its dedicated vertical next to all other media formats, Paramount Skydance is walking its talk regarding the importance of games for the company going forward. It’s a perfect example of the foundational business strategy principle that Alfred Chandler coined in 1962: structure follows strategy. The idea is that an organization needs to define its objectives and the strategy to achieve those objectives first, and only then shape the organizational structure in a way that optimally supports the strategy. For a company that strategically views gaming as a “core pillar” of its content strategy alongside film, television, and streaming, it’s only consequential to make gaming its own vertical.

Previously released post relevant to this

How Paramount Games Studio Is Built

The newly formed Paramount Games Studio consolidates three previously separate entities under one roof: Skydance Interactive, Skydance New Media, and Paramount’s historically licensing-focused game business. Tony Driscoll, Paramount’s head of corporate strategy and development, was named president of the studio. Dan Prigg, previously head of Skydance Interactive, steps up as EVP and Head of Games. Shawn Kittelsen takes the role of SVP of Creative and Production, and Amy Hennig — the acclaimed creative director who co-headed Skydance New Media — moves into the role of Studio Creative Director. The model spans three tracks: internal development, co-development with external partners such as Platinum Games on TMNT: The Last Ronin, and licensing, with all three now reporting through a single organization. Additional titles in active development include Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra and an untitled Star Wars game, both inherited from Skydance New Media.

They Are Not the Only Ones

Paramount is not the first major entertainment company to draw this conclusion. Two others are worth benchmarking against.

Netflix established its gaming division in 2021 as a standalone content vertical, treating games as a pillar on par with original series. It now offers over 100 titles on its platform, has acquired studios including Night School Studio and Boss Fight Entertainment, and continues to expand the offering without ads or in-app purchases. Netflix made a deliberate organizational choice early: games would not live inside its content licensing team. They would have their own leadership, their own budgets, and their own mandate.

The New York Times built the same logic from scratch. NYT Games started with the flagship crossword and a string of acquisitions — most notably Wordle in 2022 — and grew into a standalone content vertical with its own subscription product, its own creative team, and its own growth mandate. By 2025, NYT Games had over 10 million daily players and more than one million standalone subscribers. Games is now one of the most important drivers of the company’s digital subscription growth. And the IP is beginning to flow in the other direction too: Wordle is being adapted into an NBC television show. A game that originates IP that then travels to TV, not the other way around. This is precisely the dynamic Prigg described. The New York Times arrived there because it chose to give games its own organizational home rather than fold it into the news product.

In my book Press Play, I make the case that the companies winning in gaming are the ones that let their gaming efforts breathe and run according to gaming’s own inner clock — not the production schedules and approval chains that govern TV and film. That means giving games their own organizational home, their own senior leadership, and the latitude to build differently. Paramount’s move is exactly that principle in action.

Three Learnings for Organizations Serious About Gaming

The Paramount announcement offers a clear template. If you are a marketing, brand, or strategy leader at any entertainment company or consumer brand with meaningful IP, here is what the move tells you.

First: organizational structure is a strategic statement

How you house gaming inside your business signals what you actually believe about it. A gaming function buried inside a licensing department is a licensing business. A gaming function with its own president, its own executive bench, and its own mandate to develop original IP is a content business. The structure tells your organization, your talent market, and your partners what the ambition really is.

Second: gaming is an IP origin engine, not just an IP extension

Prigg’s conviction — that games are where new stories can begin, not just where existing stories get adapted — reframes the entire economic case for gaming investment. The companies that treat gaming as downstream of film and TV will always be playing catch-up. The ones that treat it as a peer medium will own franchises the others will eventually try to license.

Third: talent specificity matters

Paramount did not promote a general entertainment executive to run Paramount Games Studio. It assembled a leadership team with experience at Epic Games, EA, WB Games, Unity, Scopely, and NetherRealm Studios. Gaming runs on different rhythms, different creative cultures, and different player expectations than any other medium. The right org structure falls apart without the right talent inside it.

The question for every executive audience here is the same one Paramount just answered for itself: if you believe gaming matters to your business, does your organizational structure reflect that belief?

Technically Entertaining covers business strategy at the intersection of gaming, technology, and entertainment — for the decision-makers shaping what comes next. The executives who understand gaming’s strategic value today are the ones setting the agenda tomorrow. Join them.

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Car brands and gadget makers have benefitted greatly from their partnership with the Bond movies — which is why CMOs and brand leaders should pay even greater attention to a move another consumer brand that is closely associated with 007 just took to promote its latest model. I’m talking about iconic watch maker Omega. Rather than wait for the next James Bond movie to be released in theatres in 2028, they recognized that a more effective medium exists that Omega can leverage right now to engage Bond fans and consumers. Video games. It launched a special edition Omega Seamaster Diver 300M Chrono “007 First Light” for the new James Bond video game called 007 First Light that is currently breaking sales records and raking in one critical acclaim after the next.

It’s a masterclass in modern brand strategy that demonstrates how impactful video games as a channel for brands are, if the execution is done well. Before we dive into the specifics and distill learnings you can take with you into your next meeting, let’s look at a bit of history of how the Omega watch ended up on 007’s wrist in the first place.

Omega owes the world to a custome designer

Lindy Hemming. She was the costume designer for the movie GoldenEye that decided to replace Rolex with the blue-dial Omega Seamaster. It elevated Omega’s image into the modern world of coveted luxury watches and authentically aligned with the infamous Bond persona: maritime and military heritage and backstory, self-made, active individual. All directly woven into the plots of each movie as an essential piece of spy equipment.

It created unparalleled fandom and consumer desire, resulting in collectors and fans actively seeking out every new model to the point where Bond’s Omega watches wouldn’t just hold their value, they’d dramatically appreciate. Just one example from the year 2022: As part of the 60th anniversary celebrations for James Bond, Omega received record bids for Bond watches via an auction with Christie’s: GBP 226,800 (or about $279,475 in US dollars) for a Seamaster Diver 300M 007 Edition designed in collaboration with actor Daniel Craig.

Omega watches and James Bond, specifically James Bond movies, go hand in hand. So why is it that Omega’s brand leadership decided to launch its newest Seamaster model inside of a James Bond video game?

The short answer is the following: active engagement by consumers in video games is far more valuable than passive engagements in other channels, be it the movie theatre, TV, or social media. Active engagement leads to higher conversion rates, and therefore higher sales. The Omega watch launch inside the game 007 First Light is the real-life proof.

007 First Light: The Game That Broke Records on Day One

Developed by IO Interactive, the Copenhagen-based studio behind the critically acclaimed Hitman franchise in partnership with Amazon MGM Studios, 007 First Light launched on May 27, 2026, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and Windows PC. The game follows a 26-year-old James Bond across a series of missions as he earns his “00” status. It’s a fresh origin story drawn from Ian Fleming’s novels and the broader film universe, but told entirely through new eyes.

It was the first James Bond console game in over a decade, arriving 14 years after the commercially disappointing 007 Legends in 2012. The difference in reception could not be more dramatic. 007 First Light sold 1.5 million copies in its first 24 hours, making it the fastest-selling title in IO Interactive’s history, outselling every Hitman entry over the same window. Critics matched the commercial enthusiasm: the game scored an 88 on OpenCritic and an 87 on Metacritic, landing it firmly among the standout releases of 2026. Reviewers consistently praised its faithful recreation of the Bond universe — the tone, the tension, the style — all hitting the same notes that made the films iconic.

For a brand like Omega, this is the context that matters. This is a massive, high-quality piece of Bond content reaching millions of engaged consumers at a moment when the next Bond film is still two years away.

How Omega Put Its Watch Inside the Game — and What Happened Next

Omega did not simply license its logo to appear in the background of a cutscene. The Seamaster Diver 300M Chronograph is a functional piece of gameplay in 007 First Light. The watch’s chronograph subdials are used during missions, making it a tool Bond actually interacts with — not decoration. This is a meaningful distinction. IO Interactive and Omega collaborated closely to design a watch that is narratively embedded in the experience.

The real-world version, the Omega Seamaster Diver 300M Chronograph 007 First Light, launched days before the game’s release at $9,400. It is the first time Bond has worn a chronograph since Roger Moore’s Seiko in 1985’s A View to a Kill — a 40-year break that makes the design choice both historically significant and editorially driven. The watch features distinctive bi-color chronograph subdial rings (one outlined in PVD bronze gold, one in black), a ceramic case, the Omega Co-Axial Master Chronometer Caliber 9900 movement, and a special NATO strap with “007” engraved on the titanium buckle and “First Light” on the keepers. Six additional game-inspired NATO strap options are available separately.

The commercial results have been strong. The watch sold through retail allocations quickly, generating significant consumer and media interest across the watch, gaming, and lifestyle press simultaneously — an audience crossover that a standard film tie-in rarely achieves.

Three Learnings Every Brand Strategist Should Take from This

This is more than an interesting case study from the watch category. The Omega x 007 First Light integration offers a clear framework for how brands should think about video games as a channel. Three learnings stand out.

1. Gaming gives you an always-on presence, independent of a theatrical release schedule.

Omega has historically launched new Bond Seamasters to coincide with film releases. That model puts the brand entirely at the mercy of a studio’s production timeline. The next Bond film is expected in 2028. Waiting would mean two-plus years of silence from one of Omega’s most commercially powerful brand pillars. By moving into gaming, Omega reaches Bond fans on their schedule — daily, whenever a player picks up a controller. The game will be played for years. Every session is another impression, another moment the watch appears on Bond’s wrist.

2. The integration works because it’s authentic — and authenticity is the threshold for effectiveness.

This did not feel like a brand inserting itself into content. The watch is functional within the gameplay. IO Interactive built the game’s version of the watch with Omega, making the chronograph subdials part of how players actually interact with missions. Reviewers noted that the game captures the same spirit as the films — the same tone, the same aesthetic DNA that made the Omega-Bond partnership meaningful in the first place. Authenticity isn’t a nice-to-have in gaming integrations. It’s the threshold between effectiveness and invisibility. Consumers in games are highly attuned to what belongs and what doesn’t.

3. Active engagement converts at a fundamentally different rate than passive consumption.

According to McKinsey’s analysis of gaming’s attention economy, roughly 75 percent of PC and console players report high focus while playing — a level of engagement comparable only to live events, and one that handily outperforms social media, newspapers, and podcasts. Critically, McKinsey found that a 10 percent increase in consumer focus correlates with a 17 percent increase in spend. The consumer sitting in a movie theatre watching Bond strap on an Omega is a passive viewer. The consumer playing 007 First Light and using that same watch as a tool in their mission is an active participant. That distinction is not abstract. It shows up in conversion rates, in purchase intent, and ultimately in sales.

Omega understood this. Its brand leadership did not wait for the film industry to catch up. They found the highest-quality Bond content available right now, embedded themselves in it authentically, and launched a real product tied to it. The results — in both game sales and watch demand — validated the strategy.

What do you think? Is video game integration the future of luxury brand partnerships — or does it only work when the IP is as strong as James Bond? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining covers the intersection of gaming, technology, and entertainment strategy for brand and marketing leaders. If this kind of analysis is valuable to you, subscribe below.

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At a recent industry event, a brand executive shared with me the advice they had just received from a partner at a major marketing agency, the partner who oversees gaming activations for the firm’s brand clients. The advice was delivered with the confidence of a person who gets paid to know better. “Just integrate your brand in existing games, ideally Roblox or Fortnite.”

That is the playbook being sold to brand leaders in 2026. It is also exactly the playbook I argued against in the opener of this series.

So this week I want to give you the framework I actually use to map the landscape.

I’ll introduce you to the 2x2 matrix (yes, I know, but we can mock them all we want. 2x2s work!) every brand leader that evaluates gaming opportunities for his brand has to know. A 2x2 matrix gives a distinct and clear picture regarding a key decision to make on typically the two most critical decision parameters, which become the axes. The axes I’ll use here: audience scale and cultural specificity. Scale captures how many people you can reach. Specificity captures how coherent the gaming platform’s cultural identity is, and therefore how clearly your brand either belongs there or doesn’t.

These two axes pull against each other, and the tension is the point. Scale exerts a genericizing gravity. The larger a platform’s audience, the harder it becomes to hold a distinct point of view, because a point of view always excludes someone. Mass platforms drift toward the lowest common denominator. The vertical axis measures which platforms surrendered to that pull and which resisted it. GTA VI is the proof that resistance is possible: a franchise with enormous reach that never sanded down its edges.

I lay these four games on the matrix: Roblox, Fortnite, Grand Theft Auto VI, and Skate. There are other games that can be mapped on this matrix. The point is not to be complete. The point is to prevent leaders from simply taking their brand to Roblox - into one quadrant - when other and potentially better suited options exist.

The biggest strategic mistake I see brand teams make is defaulting into one quadrant when their brand belongs in another.

Roblox: The Crowd

Roblox is the undisputed scale leader in immersive gaming. Hundreds of millions of monthly users, the destination GEEIQ tracks as the home of 54.5% of all Media & Entertainment activations in virtual worlds, and the deepest creator ecosystem in the category by a wide margin.

What Roblox does not have, and what most brand decks underplay, is a defining cultural identity. The platform’s strength is its lack of one. Roblox is a substrate. More than 40 million games live on it (a figure Lisa Willet, Senior Director of Global Strategic Partnerships at Roblox, acknowledged publicly at the iicon conference earlier this year), and the dominant aesthetic shifts by experience. That openness lets a Vans skate park, a Nike training center, and a Walmart shopping mall coexist on the same platform. It also makes brand activations on Roblox feel interchangeable to anyone who isn’t already inside the build.

Visually, Roblox lives in blocky, low-polygon, primary-color territory. The aesthetic is intentionally simple and accessible to younger players, and it carries the same limitation everywhere it goes. A luxury watch, a premium fashion house, or any brand that depends on visual sophistication to signal value will struggle to read as itself inside Roblox. The brands that look right here are those whose identity already aligns with playful, toy-like aesthetics: LEGO, Hot Wheels, family entertainment, fast-casual food.

Roblox itself signals the limitation through its developer economics. In 2025, the platform rolled out a payout structure that pays developers up to 42% more on revenue generated by U.S. players aged 18 and older, an explicit move to seed mature, 17+ rated content on a platform whose base audience and aesthetic skew young. A platform with its own cultural center wouldn’t need to subsidize one. The Crowd skews young by default, and Roblox is paying developers extra to engineer older-skewing cultural pockets inside it. For brand teams, the read is that adult-skewing or culturally specific positioning on Roblox lives inside the niche corners the platform is paying developers to build. The base aesthetic still defaults to the broad, young, and generic territory that defines the Crowd.

This is the bottom-right of the matrix: mass scale, low cultural specificity. A crowd delivers reach, foot traffic, and discovery. What it cannot lend you is cultural authority. The right brand fit is awareness plays and creator collaborations. The wrong fit is anything that needs cultural weight to land.

Fortnite: The Festival

Fortnite has 650 million registered users and a cultural relevance that punches above its absolute scale. The reason is structural. Epic has spent the last three years curating Fortnite into a cultural venue through high-profile IP integrations: Travis Scott, The Simpsons, South Park, K-Pop Demon Hunters, the Star Wars events, and the deepening Disney partnership that followed Disney’s $1.5 billion investment in Epic Games in February 2024.

That curation gives Fortnite something Roblox doesn’t have: an actual cultural identity, even if much of it is borrowed. Fortnite is a festival. The headline acts are booked, the lineup rotates, and audiences arrive for the moment as much as the venue. Brands plugging into it benefit from Epic’s curatorial filter.

The trade-off is that Fortnite’s culture is largely defined by the IP Epic has already chosen to integrate. Your brand activation borrows the cultural relevance Epic has assembled. The platform sets the terms, and your brand operates inside its frame. Epic’s UEFN framework also constrains creative latitude in ways Roblox doesn’t (though it has made positive improvements in this area).

Visually, Fortnite is stylized cartoony-realism: vibrant, cinematic, with a polish that sits between Roblox’s blockiness and console-grade photorealism. The art direction is flexible enough to absorb animated, live-action, and musical IP without breaking its own visual identity. The fit weakens for brands that need either gritty realism or restrained premium polish. Fortnite events look like Fortnite, regardless of what’s plugged into them.

This is the middle-right of the matrix: mass scale, medium-to-high cultural specificity. The right brand fit is brands with strong cultural IP that want amplification through Epic’s network.

Grand Theft Auto VI: The Metropolis

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick just days ago confirmed the date: GTA VI launches later this year, November 19, and lands in the top-right of the matrix the moment it opens to players. The franchise has sold more than 425 million copies in its lifetime and built one of the most coherent universes in entertainment: satirical Americana, hip-hop and pop-culture saturation, and a fanbase that has spent two decades inside the Rockstar tone.

That tone is the asset. GTA VI is a metropolis, a place dense enough to hold millions of people and still feel unmistakably like itself. GTA’s radio stations have parodied brand culture since the original release. The map is built around branded storefronts, billboards, and product references that the audience reads as part of the world, the same way they read the in-game satire. The fanbase expects brand presence and accepts it on Rockstar’s terms.

The catch is that Rockstar has historically refused real brand integrations. In a recent Variety interview at the iicon conference, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick confirmed that GTA VI will not feature real brand names, explaining:

“It’s a fictional world and everything in it is fictional. So we’re not even at risk of doing brand partnerships because all the brands are made up.”

From the same stage, Zelnick acknowledged the company has received many requests from brands eager to integrate, even as Rockstar holds the line.

My read remains the one I made in the opener: if these become true integrations with Rockstar holding creative sign-off, the economics will eventually become too compelling for Take-Two to leave on the table.

Visually, GTA VI is photorealistic, gritty, satirical, and unmistakably mature. The franchise’s art direction lives in the lineage of cinematic crime drama crossed with American satire, now rendered with top-tier console fidelity. The aesthetic fits adult lifestyle brands, automotive, spirits, fashion (especially streetwear), and premium audio in ways that no other immersive game on this matrix can match.

This is also where GTA VI’s M-rating becomes a strategic asset rather than a constraint. Roblox and Fortnite have to maintain audience appropriateness for younger players, which limits the kind of brand content that can land authentically. GTA VI carries no such constraint. The platform IS the 18+ audience, which makes it the only immersive game on this matrix where adult-targeted brand content (R-rated humor, mature lifestyle, beer and spirits, fashion brands with edgier creative) can show up without compromise. For brands whose actual audience skews adult, that is rare oxygen.

This is the top-right of the matrix: mass scale, very high cultural specificity, with a uniquely adult audience profile. Built-in audience, curated entry, high ceiling for the brands that earn it.

Skate: The Scene

Skate occupies the quadrant no other platform on this matrix can reach. EA’s Skate launched into free-to-play early access on September 16, 2025. The game crossed 15 million players in under three weeks, passed 23 million players by the end of 2025, and is currently maintaining 750,000+ daily active users. That’s still a fraction of Roblox or Fortnite’s scale, but a fast-moving fraction with an audience the larger platforms can’t reach.

That smaller scale is the entire strategic point. Skateboarding reads as a niche only if you count participants. It is really a cultural nucleus, with concentric rings radiating outward into streetwear, music, fashion, art, and film. A brand entering the skate scene reaches far more than skaters. It taps a culture that has shaped youth identity and adjacent industries for fifty years, punching well above its participation numbers the whole time. That radiating quality is why the Scene holds value despite the smaller raw audience.

The Scene also carries the most developed brand-association language in action sports. Nike SB, Vans, Supreme, Thrasher, Independent Trucks, Element, Spitfire. These brands ARE the language of skateboarding. They built it from the inside, sponsoring riders before anyone called it influencer marketing. New entrants who don’t speak that language get rejected by the audience. New entrants who do speak it get adopted with a fluency that Roblox and Fortnite activations rarely achieve.

Visually, Skate’s language is realistic with edge: motion-graphic energy, urban grit, the camera angles and color grading of a real skate documentary. The art direction is already aligned with the visual codes that Vans, Nike SB, Supreme, and Thrasher have used in their marketing for decades, which means brands that fit those codes get cultural read for free. The misfit is corporate, B2B, polished-luxury, or anything that signals visual restraint. Skate doesn’t look restrained, and that is the point.

The Nike collaboration already present in the game’s early access is the early proof point. I’ll go deeper on that, the broader brand opportunity, and the conversations EA is having with brand partners in next week’s deep dive.

This is the top-left of the matrix: niche scale, very high cultural specificity. The quadrant most brand decks skip past, and the one most likely to deliver disproportionate cultural credibility.

What the Matrix Actually Tells You

The matrix is a trade-space, not a leaderboard. Each quadrant rewards a different strategic intent. The Crowd rewards low-cost reach experiments and Gen Alpha exposure. The Festival rewards brands with strong cultural IP that want amplification through Epic’s network. The Metropolis rewards adult-focused brands, and those patient enough to earn a place in Rockstar’s world. The Scene rewards brands with authentic claim to a subculture.

The empty bottom-left quadrant, niche scale with low cultural specificity, is correctly empty. Almost no brand should aim there.

The brand teams making the strongest gaming decisions in 2026 treat this as a portfolio question. They place a smaller bet in the Scene because that is where their core audience already lives, and run a broader awareness play in the Festival because that is where their next demographic will discover them. They resist defaulting the entire budget to the Crowd just because Roblox tops the activation-count chart in last year’s report.

The question to bring back to your team this quarter is which quadrant best matches what you are trying to do, and whether your current strategy is biased toward the right one.

Next week: the Skate deep dive. Specifically, why skateboarding culture is uniquely attractive to brands, what Nike’s early integration is telling us about the platform’s brand potential, and the conversations EA is having with brand partners that haven’t made it into the trade press yet.

Which quadrant does your brand actually belong in, and which quadrant is your current activation strategy biased toward? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining is the publication for marketing, brand, and strategy leaders navigating the intersection of gaming, technology, and entertainment. Subscribe to get next week’s deep dive into Skate, plus the closing interview with the General Manager at EA overseeing the franchise.

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Forty million. That’s the room your brand experience is being asked to stand out in.

I bring this up because the question I get asked most often in executive meetings these days is some version of: “Which gaming platform should we be on?” And almost every time, the person asking has already half-decided the answer. Usually it’s Roblox. Sometimes it’s Fortnite. The kneejerk reaction across boardrooms is to default to the two platforms that dominate the headlines.

The data, on the surface, supports that instinct. According to GEEIQ’s Q2 2026 Media & Entertainment Micro Report, 78.4% of all Media & Entertainment brand activations in virtual worlds happen on either Roblox (54.5%) or Fortnite (23.9%). The category itself has grown 79-fold since 2020, from 10 tracked activations to 789 today. And as of 2026, integrations into existing worlds have overtaken brand-owned experiences for the first time, sitting at 58% of the mix.

If you’re an executive scanning these charts, the playbook looks obvious. Go where the audience already lives. Plug in.

That playbook is a trap. The honest answer to “which platform should we be on?” is almost never a single platform. It’s a thoughtful, nuanced “it depends.”

This is the first piece in a four-part series on platform concentration in immersive gaming. Over the coming weeks I’ll walk through the 2x2 framework I use with brand leaders to map their options, take a deep dive into Skate as the overlooked alternative now rising up, and close the series with an interview with the General Manager at EA overseeing the Skate franchise. Today’s piece is the foundation: why concentrating your gaming spend in two platforms is more fragile than it looks, and the five questions every brand leader needs to answer before signing the contract.

The Concentration Problem Brands Aren’t Pricing In

The 78.4% number from GEEIQ is the headline you’ve probably already seen circulating in trade decks. What deserves more attention is what’s underneath it.

Six years ago, the category was 90% brand-owned experiences. Brands built their own worlds, hired their own teams, controlled their own roadmaps. Today, 58% of activations are integrations into someone else’s platform. That shift has delivered enormous gains in speed and scale. It has also represented a quiet transfer of leverage, from the brand to the platform owner.

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Algorithm changes you can’t predict. Revenue share changes you can’t negotiate. Audience composition shifts you can’t control. The same dynamics that have made marketers wary of putting their entire budget on Meta or TikTok are now playing out inside two gaming platforms. The executives I speak with are starting to ask the same questions they asked about social five years ago: what happens when the rules change?

Question One: What Is the Activation Actually For?

Before you pick a platform, get specific about the goal. Are you running a broad brand awareness play with a younger demographic? Then yes, Roblox and Fortnite should be on your list. Roblox in particular still skews younger, and Fortnite gives you cultural relevance across Gen Z and Millennials.

If your goal is to drive real-world commerce with the affluent, core-consumer demographic, the answer changes completely. The average mobile gamer globally is between 36 and 41 years old. That’s where household economic decision-making sits. That’s where credit cards already get pulled out for in-app purchases on a daily basis. Mobile games should be at or near the top of your list, and a Roblox build is almost certainly the wrong place to put your dollars.

The platform follows the goal. Reverse that order and you end up with an activation that looked good in the pitch deck and underperformed in market.

Question Two: Who Is the Audience, Really?

Every platform has its own culture. Roblox is a creator-first ecosystem where teen builders set the pace. Fortnite is a cultural mainline where Travis Scott, The Simpsons, and South Park share the same stage. Mobile games like Royal Match or Coin Master attract a different audience entirely: short play sessions, often on the couch, frequently in the over-35 bracket. Players come to each of these games for different reasons, and they arrive open to different brand messages.

Brands don’t have to be everywhere. They need to be where they can authentically meet their ideal audience. That requires deepening your understanding of player preferences, the dynamics unique to each platform, and how your brand actually fits the room. The best activations I’ve seen come from brand teams that picked one or two platforms with real conviction about why. The weakest come from brand teams that picked the platforms that scored well on a reach chart.

Question Three: Where Is the Playing Field Going?

The map for 2026 looks different from the map for 2025. Two games in particular are about to change the calculus.

Grand Theft Auto VI launches later this year. Given Rockstar’s live operations chops and the franchise’s broad fandom, GTA VI will be an extremely attractive playground for brands. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick has already confirmed on stage that the company has been receiving many requests and offers from brands to integrate. So far, Rockstar has stayed away to avoid “tarnishing” the experience with ads. My read: if these became actual brand integrations with Rockstar holding creative sign-off, rather than ad units, the money becomes too appealing for Take-Two to turn down indefinitely.

EA’s Skate, currently in soft launch, has roughly 2 million monthly active users and is actively experimenting and negotiating with brands. It doesn’t have the scale of Roblox or Fortnite yet, and it doesn’t need to in order to become an attractive alternative for brand spend. Skateboarding culture brings something the larger platforms can’t easily replicate: an authentic subculture with decades of real-world brand history, from Nike SB to Vans to Supreme.

Welevel is another emerging option worth keeping an eye on. The point of all this is not to chase every shiny object. The point is that the platform map for immersive games is genuinely about to expand, and concentrating your spend on two platforms right now means you’re not building the relationships, the data, or the team you’ll need to act when the map shifts under your feet.

Question Four: Can You Actually Be Found?

Back to Lisa Willet’s admission for a second. Forty million games on Roblox. Discovery is broken to the point where the platform itself is investing heavily to fix it. That fact alone should reframe how you think about “scale” on Roblox.

Yes, the platform has hundreds of millions of users. Your brand experience is not competing for their attention against the other 217 brands GEEIQ tracks. It’s competing against 40 million experiences, most of them built by independent creators with stronger native audiences than any brand will ever have. The cost of standing out is going up. The CPM math that justified the build a year ago looks different today.

This is the part most brand briefs underprice. Reach on the platform is a separate question from reach inside the platform.

Question Five: Who Owns the Data and the Inventory?

This is the question I’ve heard more in the last few weeks than in the previous twelve months combined. Brand leaders are increasingly asking: what would it take for us to build our own game, or at least partner in a way where we have full access to the entire world?

Two reasons keep coming up.

First, first-party data. Roblox and Fortnite share information with brands to varying degrees of transparency, and the level of access differs by brand and by deal. Even the most generous platform-side data sharing comes nowhere close to what brands can unlock when they own the entire experience. Owning the customer relationship inside a game means combining gameplay signals with everything you already know from your CRM, your retail footprint, your loyalty program. That’s a fundamentally different asset than a top-line engagement report from a third-party platform.

Second, inventory. For media companies in particular, owning the game means owning a new advertising surface they can monetize with their existing ad partners. Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount have stopped thinking about gaming as a marketing line item. They’re thinking about it as an inventory category. That’s a different conversation, and it leads to different platform choices.

Treat Platform Selection Like Retail Selection

The default to Roblox or Fortnite has a real logic behind it. Both platforms deliver scale, engagement, and a clear unit-economics story. The problem is that brand leaders too often arrive at the answer before they’ve asked the question. Concentration risk, discovery friction, and a static view of the platform map quietly make the decision for them.

The brands that will win the next phase of immersive gaming are the ones treating platform selection the way they treat retail selection. Not every store carries your audience. Not every store fits your brand. Not every store will be open in three years. The same logic applies here.

In the next piece, I’ll walk through the 2x2 matrix I use to map Roblox, Fortnite, GTA VI, and Skate against the two variables that matter most: scale of audience and cultural specificity. The matrix is what turns “it depends” into a decision you can actually defend in the boardroom.

Which platform are you betting on for 2026, and what’s the question that’s pointing you there? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining is the publication for marketing, brand, and strategy leaders navigating the intersection of gaming, technology, and entertainment. Subscribe to get the rest of this four-part series on platform concentration in immersive gaming, starting with next week’s deep dive into the 2x2 matrix that maps Roblox, Fortnite, GTA VI, and Skate.

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When I asked him about the strategy behind the gaming offering, how he plans to build it, position it, and grow it, his answer was disarmingly simple:

“It’s easy. We’ll just copy what The New York Times is doing.”

I have heard that exact answer more times than I can count over the past 18 months. In executive workshops, on stage at industry conferences, in private investor meetings. Always the same sentence. Sometimes with a knowing smile.

The New York Times has become the default reference point for gaming strategy in the news and media industry, and for good reason. Since acquiring Wordle in January 2022 for a reported low seven figures, the company has stitched together a games portfolio that now drives billions of plays per year and shows up repeatedly in earnings calls as a key contributor to subscriber growth, bundle conversion, and engagement. NYT Games has done what every publisher dreams of doing: turn casual readers into daily habits and daily habits into paid subscriptions.

So copying The New York Times sounds like a safe bet. It is the opposite of safe. It is one of the most dangerous strategic moves a media executive can make in 2026.

Why Copying The New York Times Gaming Playbook Is a Strategic Trap

There are two structural reasons the “just copy the NYT” mindset breaks down at the foundation.

First, copying a competitor’s playbook is the fastest route to commoditization. The single most important premise of any successful games offering is authenticity. The portfolio has to stay true to the brand and be grounded in the publisher’s unique audience. Copying what others are doing is the direct contradiction of that premise. It produces sameness, and sameness erases the differentiation that gaming is supposed to create in the first place.

Second, every piece of content a news organization creates has to be grounded in the audience first. When you copy someone else’s playbook, you inherit their assumptions about their readership without ever questioning whether those assumptions apply to yours. What converts a Times reader in Manhattan into a paying subscriber may have nothing to do with what your readers in Munich, Madrid, or Manchester want from your brand. The execution can look identical and the outcome can be wildly different.

The proof is already on the table. Walk through the gaming offerings of major newspapers and magazines around the world today and you will find the same default product on the homepage over and over again: a crossword puzzle. The Washington Post, Die Zeit, Bild, The Guardian, Le Monde. Every major publisher’s first move into games has been to ship a crossword and call it a strategy.

Crosswords have a real heritage in print journalism. They are connected to newspapers the way pickles are connected to a good cheeseburger. Pickles, however, do not all taste the same. There are dozens of other ingredients that make a cheeseburger great. If every publisher serves the same pickle, the entire category tastes identical to the consumer. The differentiation collapses the moment everyone shows up with the same recipe.

How Bloomberg Uses Games as a Subscription Funnel

Two publishers are demonstrating what a differentiated, audience-first games strategy actually looks like in practice: Bloomberg and The Atlantic. Both are building out gaming offerings. Both are following different playbooks. Both are getting real traction.

Bloomberg currently has two games live inside its “Explore” content section:

1. Pointed, a weekly news game for risk-takers, launched in March 2025 and grounded in current events and the news cycle.

2. Alphadots, a daily word puzzle, launched in September 2025.

The two games are presented as standalone products in the Explore section. There is no bundled, branded games destination yet. To play either of them, users only have to register with an email address and create a free account. No subscription required.

The strategic intent is clear. Bloomberg is using games as a top-of-funnel acquisition engine for its broader digital subscription business. The hook is the game. The conversion target is the subscription. The bet is on cross-pollination: a user who comes in for Pointed gets exposed to Bloomberg’s terminal-grade journalism, market data, opinion content, and over time the habit forms. The games themselves pull from the same editorial DNA as the rest of the publication. Current events. Markets. The news cycle. The game is a free sample of what the Bloomberg brand actually stands for.

This is the part most publishers miss. Bloomberg has resisted the temptation to build games as a separate entertainment product bolted onto the side of the newsroom. The games are an extension of the journalism. They reinforce the brand promise of being deeply plugged into the news and the markets. That is what makes the funnel work.

How The Atlantic Built a Six-Game Portfolio That Mirrors Its Editorial DNA

The Atlantic is one step further down the learning curve. The publication has scaled to six games in a remarkably short window. The lineup includes the expected crossword, but it also includes trivia, word games, and a daily puzzle game that uncovers historical facts tied to a specific date in the year.

What makes this portfolio interesting is the mix. Yes, there is a crossword. There is also a trivia game directly connected to recent Atlantic stories and reporting. There is a history-driven puzzle that authentically mirrors The Atlantic’s editorial approach of going deeper into any given topic and pulling in historical context. The history game feels like a playable version of an Atlantic feature, and that is exactly the point.

Five of the six games are free to play directly on the website and inside the app. One game sits fully behind the subscription paywall. That single design choice tells you everything about where The Atlantic sits in its learning journey.

Games are still primarily an acquisition funnel: a reason for new users to come in, sign up, and come back weekly. The paywalled game signals something more advanced. It suggests The Atlantic has early internal evidence that games drive measurable conversion from free user to paid subscriber, and that they materially contribute to subscriber retention and stickiness once a user is in. The New York Times has been signaling exactly that pattern in its quarterly results for two years. The Atlantic is now building on that learning with its own audience and its own editorial voice.

The Real Business Case for Games in News and Media

Step back from the specific products for a moment. The high-level appeal of games for news and media organizations is obvious if you understand consumer behavior.

Games provide a reason to come back daily. They fit naturally into the routines consumers already have: checking emails, reading the news, looking at the stock market, playing a game over morning coffee. The behavioral hook is the same one the morning paper used to own.

Games also extend session time. They increase the number of touchpoints per user per week. They create habit loops that are measurable and predictable. They generate first-party engagement data that can inform editorial, advertising, and product decisions across the company. They are one of the few content formats that holds up against TikTok and Instagram for daily share of mind. Every major news publisher should have a games strategy on the executive agenda right now.

The mistake is never in having a strategy. The mistake is in the execution.

What News and Media Executives Should Build Instead

If you are sitting in the Chief Digital Officer chair, the Chief Product Officer chair, or the CEO chair of a news or media business in 2026, the right question is “what do my readers want that I can authentically and uniquely deliver in game form?”

For a general-interest newspaper, a high-quality crossword or sudoku may genuinely be the most authentic answer. The format and the audience match. That is a defensible choice.

For a sports publication, the most authentic answer is almost certainly a fantasy or manager-style game. Readers come for standings, trades, and matchups. The game has to feel like an extension of that obsession.

For a fashion magazine, the most authentic answer lives closer to a styling game, an interior design challenge, or a daily aesthetic puzzle.

For a financial publication like Bloomberg, the most authentic answer is a market-aware news game like Pointed.

For an ideas-driven publication like The Atlantic, the most authentic answer is a history-driven puzzle game tied to the editorial worldview.

The pattern is consistent across every category. The best games offering for any publisher is the one that reflects what the publication uniquely stands for and what its specific audience deeply cares about. The Times did not become great at games by copying anyone. It built its games strategy around the cultural authority and crossword heritage of the Times brand. Copying The New York Times means copying a strategy that was designed around someone else’s audience.

The Bottom Line for News and Media Executives

The next three years will separate the publishers who win at games from the publishers who built tribute acts. The category is already crowding with crossword clones from every major newsroom in North America and Europe. The early winners will be the publishers who treat games the way the best of them treat editorial: as an authentic, distinctive expression of what the brand does best, in service of an audience that is uniquely theirs.

Bloomberg and The Atlantic are showing the playbook in real time. They are asking the right question first and shipping the answer second. That sequence is the entire game.

If your gaming strategy starts with a screenshot of the NYT homepage, the call you should make next week is the one that brings your audience research, your editorial leadership, and your product team into the same room. Then ask one question: what would our readers find irresistible that nobody else can build?

The answer to that question is your games strategy.

What do you think? Are publishers in your market building authentic, audience-first games offerings, or is the crossword playbook winning by default? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining is a Substack publication on the business of gaming, technology, and entertainment for marketing, brand, and strategy leaders. If this piece was useful to you, subscribe for weekly analysis.

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A few days later, the news hit. Google DeepMind had taken a minority stake in Fenris Creations, the studio formerly known as CCP Games and the developer of EVE Online. The same week, Alexandre Moufarek, Product Lead for Project Inception at DeepMind, sat on that panel and explained why gameplay data is foundational to advancing Gemini and the next generation of AI systems. Moufarek’s career started in video games. So did Demis Hassabis’s. Hassabis built simulation games like Theme Park before he co-founded DeepMind, and he has said publicly that games are the perfect training ground for AI.

My thesis: video games are the most underestimated infrastructure in artificial intelligence today, and the EVE Online deal proves it. But there is a layer missing from the conversation, and DeepMind’s own research already points to it. Gameplay data captures what players do. It does not capture why. Without modeling player psychology, AI will hit a ceiling on its way to understanding any complex world, starting with virtual ones and ending with the real one.

The deal that just rewired AI’s training stack

On the surface, the Fenris Creations announcement reads like a typical management buyout. Pearl Abyss sold the studio back to its leadership for $120 million in cash and non-cash consideration. CCP rebranded as Fenris Creations, kept its studios in Reykjavík, London, and Shanghai, and confirmed there are no layoffs. The company closed 2025 with over $70 million in revenue, a record-breaking November, and the second-highest revenue quarter in EVE Online’s 20-year history. Two new titles are in development: EVE Vanguard, an extraction-adventure FPS, and EVE Frontier, an online space survival game.

The interesting part is what came next. Alongside the buyout, Fenris signed a research partnership with Google DeepMind. Google took a minority equity stake. DeepMind will work with an offline version of EVE Online running on a local server to test and evaluate models. The stated focus areas are revealing: long-horizon planning, memory, and continual learning. These are three of the hardest open problems in AI. They are also three of the hardest problems EVE Online players have been solving every day for two decades.

EVE Online is famous for player-driven economies that rival small countries, for corporations that span continents, for wars that last years and involve tens of thousands of human participants. It is one of the only environments on the planet where you can study persistent, adversarial, multi-agent decision-making at scale. That is why DeepMind wanted in. Not because it is a game. Because it is, functionally, a synthetic civilization.

Why games have always been AI’s training ground

Gaming has been at the heart of every major DeepMind breakthrough. Atari DQN taught reinforcement learning to play 2D arcade games at superhuman levels. AlphaGo beat the world champion in a game with more board states than atoms in the universe. AlphaStar mastered StarCraft II, a real-time strategy game with imperfect information and long planning horizons. SIMA, DeepMind’s Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent, learned to follow natural language instructions across multiple commercial 3D games.

Hassabis put it directly in the Fenris announcement: games are “the perfect training ground for developing and testing AI algorithms.” There are good reasons for this. Games provide closed environments with clear rules, dense feedback signals, and effectively unlimited episodes. They generate behavioral data orders of magnitude richer than what any internet scrape can produce. The best games push humans to the edge of their cognitive limits, which means an AI that can match human performance has, by definition, learned something hard.

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Moufarek’s role at DeepMind is to operationalize this. Project Inception focuses on using gameplay data to advance Gemini’s capabilities for complex world creation. The thinking is straightforward. If you want AI to model the real world, train it on the most complex synthetic worlds humans have ever built. Train it on EVE Online, on Ubisoft’s open worlds, on the messy, multi-agent, long-horizon dynamics that no static dataset can capture.

For brand and strategy leaders, the implication is significant. The companies producing the richest behavioral data on Earth right now are not Big Tech platforms. They are gaming publishers. The most valuable data partnerships in AI over the next five years will look a lot more like Fenris-DeepMind than like the licensing deals we saw with publishing and media.

What EVE Online uniquely provides

EVE Online is interesting to DeepMind for one reason above all others. It is the closest thing we have to a stable, persistent, complex system where every meaningful decision is made by a human. There are no NPC factions running the economy. The cartels, the alliances, the heists, the betrayals, all of it comes from players. This produces behavioral patterns functionally equivalent to studying a real economy in miniature.

Consider what a single fleet engagement in EVE generates: spatial reasoning across thousands of units, real-time coordination among dozens of human commanders, deception about troop movements, negotiation with allied corporations, betrayal of long-standing pacts, and resource allocation decisions tied to in-game markets that respond to scarcity. All of this happens in a single session. Multiply it by 20 years of continuous operation, and you have the densest behavioral dataset on long-horizon human cooperation and conflict that exists outside of human history itself.

This is exactly the data DeepMind needs to make progress on planning, memory, and continual learning. A model trained on EVE has to figure out how to maintain coherent strategies across weeks of game time. It has to remember what it learned three engagements ago. It has to update its understanding when the meta shifts. These capabilities map directly onto the AGI roadmap.

The missing layer: player psychology

Here is where the conversation needs to evolve. Gameplay data captures actions. It captures positions, decisions, win rates, resource flows, and click patterns. What it does not naturally capture is the cognitive and emotional state that produced those actions.

Two players in EVE can take identical actions for completely different reasons. One is following a calculated long-term strategy. The other is acting out of frustration after losing a ship. The behavior looks the same. The decision-making process behind it is fundamentally different. Train AI only on the behavioral output and you teach it to mimic patterns. You do not teach it to understand intent.

This matters because intent is what generalizes. A model that knows why a player made a decision can predict what they will do in a situation it has never seen. A model that only knows what was done becomes brittle the moment context shifts. This is the same problem that has plagued recommendation engines, autonomous vehicles, and large language models for years. They are very good at predicting the next observable action. They are weak at modeling the human reasoning behind it.

For AI to move from pattern matching to genuine world understanding, it has to model the psychology of the actors in the world. Beliefs. Goals. Emotions. Risk tolerance. Trust. Memory of past interactions. The cognitive architecture that produces behavior, rather than just the behavior itself.

DeepMind’s own framework confirms this

What makes this argument concrete is that DeepMind has already articulated it themselves. In March 2026, the DeepMind research team published a paper titled “Measuring Progress Toward AGI: A Cognitive Framework.” It is one of the clearest documents I have seen on what the AGI roadmap actually looks like. The authors propose a Cognitive Taxonomy with 10 cognitive faculties an AGI system needs to demonstrate.

Eight of them are foundational: perception, generation, attention, learning, memory, reasoning, metacognition, and executive functions. Two are composite faculties that require multiple foundational abilities working together: problem solving and social cognition.

Social cognition, as the paper defines it, is “the ability to process and interpret social information and to respond appropriately in social situations.” It includes social perception (reading cues from facial expressions, tone, body language), theory of mind (reasoning about beliefs, desires, emotions, intentions, and perspectives of others), and social skills (cooperation, negotiation, deception, persuasion).

The paper is explicit on the consequence of weakness in this area: “a system deficient in social understanding is likely to perform poorly in situations that involve complex interactions with people.”

That is the gap. EVE Online provides world-class data on long-horizon planning, memory, and continual learning. It also happens to be one of the richest available environments for studying theory of mind, negotiation, deception, and cooperation at scale. Whether DeepMind taps into the social cognition layer of EVE, alongside the planning layer, will determine how useful this partnership ultimately is for AGI progress.

What this means for brand and strategy leaders

Three implications matter for executives reading this.

First, gaming IP is now strategic AI infrastructure. If your brand has equity in a gaming partnership, a virtual world, or a UGC platform, the underlying behavioral data is potentially more valuable than the in-game advertising or licensing economics. Treat the data as a balance sheet asset and evaluate it the way you would evaluate proprietary research.

Second, the next wave of AI partnerships will be psychological, not only behavioral. The companies that pair gameplay data with player psychology research, including motivation, identity, social dynamics, and emotional state, will produce models that understand humans rather than models that imitate them. If your category depends on understanding consumer intent at scale, this is the partnership pattern to track.

Third, this is a wake-up call for marketers and strategists who still think of AI as a content tool. The systems being trained on EVE Online today will eventually power the assistants, agents, and decision systems your customers interact with. The ones that succeed will understand why people make decisions, going well beyond simply tracking what they choose.

The Fenris Creations deal is a signal. The DeepMind cognitive framework is the strategy. Together, they mark the moment AI started taking psychology as seriously as it takes data.

What do you think? Is gameplay psychology the missing piece in the AGI roadmap, or is behavioral data alone enough? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining is a publication for marketing, brand, and strategy leaders navigating the intersection of gaming, technology, and entertainment. If this resonated, subscribe to get the next piece in your inbox.

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Sit with that for a second. The arena experience that anchors the cultural mythology of basketball reaches one fan in a hundred. The other 99 live with their teams somewhere else. Increasingly, that somewhere else is a video game.

I left the conference convinced that the conventional sports marketing playbook is being quietly retired. The new playbook treats games as the primary venue of fandom, treats athletes as full-time content partners, and treats commerce as a closed-loop function of the experience itself. Two iicon panels and a fresh report from EMARKETER, “From fan to cart: Why sports fandom has become a direct path to purchase,” put the architecture in plain view.

Sports fandom now lives where the brand and the league activate together, and games sit at the center of that activation. The brands building for this reality are turning fan emotion into measurable commerce, with new tools to close the loop from identification to purchase.

The NBA, 2K, and the Video Game as the League’s Living Room

The NBA and Take-Two’s 2K shared the iicon stage to talk about a partnership that has quietly become one of the most important brand-distribution channels in professional sports.

Crystal MacKenzie, VP of Global Marketing at NBA 2K, framed the strategic stakes plainly. For a huge share of the global fanbase, NBA 2K is the first touchpoint with the league. A teenager in Manila or São Paulo discovers Anthony Edwards through the controller, then graduates to highlight reels, jersey purchases, and live streams. The game is the gateway, and the gateway is wide.

That makes 2K’s authenticity obsession a strategic asset. The game strives to be the most accurate representation of the actual league, allowing fans to experience and identify with their teams and individual athletes. Player likenesses, signature moves, arena audio, broadcast presentation, all of it has to feel like the real thing. Authenticity earns the right to be the league’s facsimile.

O’Keeffe pointed to live service as the multiplier. In-game events, merchandise drops, and seasonal moments timed to the actual NBA calendar give the league an always-on amplification channel. When a marquee trade happens, 2K reflects it. When the All-Star Game arrives, the game runs themed events. The boundary between watching the league and playing the league is dissolving in real time.

The implication for brands is direct. If 99% of fans never see a live game, your activation strategy needs to reach them where they actually are. A 30-second TV spot during the playoffs is one channel. The video game where the same fan spends hundreds of hours a year is another, and it carries a fundamentally different relationship.

Adidas + Roblox: The Authenticity Test in Action

The Roblox-Adidas panel, featuring Phillip Waller, SVP of Brand Development and GM of Gaming, and Thomas Wehner, Head of Gaming, at Adidas, was the most operationally useful conversation I attended at iicon. It revealed how a global brand actually shows up in a gaming environment without alienating the audience.

Waller opened with two numbers that should be on every sports marketer’s wall. Kids spend an average of 2.5 hours per day on Roblox. And 45% of time spent on sports games inside Roblox happens outside the official season of the actual sport. Sports fandom in this environment is no longer seasonal, and it’s no longer bounded by the official calendar at all.

The structural choice Adidas made is worth studying. The company’s gaming division sits inside business development rather than marketing. Waller explained the reasoning at iicon: anchoring in business development gives the team flexibility on creative and production decisions, keeps them close to the consumer, and lets them experiment without the campaign timelines and KPIs that constrain a typical marketing function. That’s a structural insight most brands haven’t internalized.

His operating principle was direct. “If we can’t add value, we’re not doing it.” Adidas has declined a long list of publisher offers because the fit wasn’t right. The discipline of saying no is the discipline that earns credibility with players.

In the early phase, Adidas deliberately stayed away from heavy tracking. The goal was learning rather than optimizing. The team needed to understand the cultural grammar of the platform before measuring against it. As the work matured, the critical metric for Roblox activations became users’ willingness to spend in-game Robux currency on Adidas items. A free skin offers no signal of value. A paid skin proves the brand earned the consumer’s scarcest resource: their game economy.

Waller’s two pieces of advice for any brand thinking about gaming activation are worth remembering. First, connect your brand DNA to the DNA of the game. The activation has to feel native to the platform, the players, and the moment. Second, avoid building your own worlds from scratch unless you’re already in the world-building business. Learn first with smaller, lower-stakes projects, then scale what proves out and identify your best long-term fit inside gaming.

The Macro Picture: Athletes Have Become the Channel

The iicon insights snap into focus once you overlay them on the EMARKETER data. The report’s core finding is that individual athletes drive purchases that team loyalty alone cannot explain.

A YouGov survey of more than 900 US sports fans found that 25% have bought a team jersey primarily because of a specific athlete. Among 35-to-54-year-olds, the demographic with the most disposable income, that figure climbs to 28%. 10% of fans have bought merchandise for a team they don’t support because of a single player. 8% have purchased products specifically because an athlete recommended them.

Social media has accelerated the shift. 46% of US sports fans follow sports influencers, and the number jumps to 57% among Gen Z, per IBM data cited by EMARKETER. The economics are hard to argue with: NIL student-athletes are posting a 5.6% engagement rate, 3.7 times higher than the 1.9% rate of traditional influencers, according to Opendorse. College sports sponsorships now outperform Super Bowl ads in brand recall at a fraction of the cost. A college playoff ad runs around $2 million versus $8 million for a 30-second Super Bowl spot, per Yahoo Sports.

The audience is enormous and concentrated. EMARKETER projects 164.7 million US fans will tune into live sports broadcasts in 2026, with the FIFA World Cup added to a packed Olympics year. The fan is reachable, the data is rich, and the conversion is closer than ever.

Commerce Media Is Closing the Loop

The most underappreciated shift in the EMARKETER report is the rise of sports-specific commerce media networks. Sports retailers are turning their first-party fan data into ad businesses, creating a category that didn’t exist five years ago.

Fanatics launched Fanatics Advertising in August 2025, with two ad networks running underneath it. The company posted $8.1 billion in revenue in 2024, up 15% year over year, with collectibles growing 40% to $1.6 billion, per Sportico. Jeremi Gorman, the former Netflix and Snap executive Fanatics hired as chief revenue officer, framed the value proposition pointedly: “Sponsoring a team is very expensive. Sponsoring a league is even more expensive. But that doesn’t mean brands don’t want to reach sports fans.” Non-endemic advertisers, brands that don’t sell on Fanatics, already account for the majority of the division’s revenue.

Dick’s Sporting Goods is running a similar play. The Dick’s Media network spans 850-plus stores across 47 states, with in-store media in its 100,000-square-foot House of Sport concept locations expanding to 50 by the end of 2026. The technology layer is what makes it more than a branding exercise. Radar and RFID track product pickups and visitor interactions, mapping them to sales. An Adidas campaign for the AE2 basketball shoe, endorsed by Anthony Edwards, used magnetic shelves to trigger nearby screens with Edwards content the moment a shopper picked up the shoe. 80% of Dick’s online orders fulfill from stores. 65% of 2024 sales came from omnichannel customers. The closed loop between in-store ad exposure and purchase is real.

The macro context: commerce media represented 19.5% of US digital ad spend in 2025 and is projected to reach 23.3% by 2029, per EMARKETER’s forecast. Sports-focused retailers with high-intent shoppers and rich first-party data are positioned to capture an outsized share.

What Brand and Strategy Leaders Should Do Now

Five operating principles emerge when you stack the iicon panels against the EMARKETER data.

Anchor your gaming work in business strategy rather than marketing campaigns. Adidas’s decision to house its gaming division inside business development is a structural choice with cultural consequences. It changes the time horizon, the metrics, and the cultural posture of the team. Brands that bolt gaming onto a marketing P&L will keep producing one-off activations that fail to compound.

Match brand DNA to game DNA before doing anything else. Waller’s principle protects the player relationship, and the player relationship is the entire asset. If your brand cannot bring genuine value into a world, stay out of that world.

Treat athletes as long-term content partners. The EMARKETER data is unambiguous: athletes drive purchase behavior more reliably than team loyalty does. NIL economics are turning college athletes into engagement engines that outperform traditional creators by 3.7x. The brands signing multi-year, content-led deals will compound advantage over time.

Use leagues and games as distribution. The NBA-2K relationship is a distribution channel for the league’s IP into 99% of its fanbase. A brand partnership inside that channel reaches a different fan, in a different mood, in a different transaction context than a courtside placement does.

Layer commerce media on top of every activation. Fanatics Advertising and the Dick’s Media network are turning fandom into measurable purchase intent. Non-endemic brands can now reach sports fans at the moment of purchase without paying for an official sponsorship. The cost of entry is lower, the measurement is sharper, and the loop closes inside the same shopping session.

The Real Stadium Has Already Moved

iicon 2026 made one thing inescapable. The center of gravity of sports fandom has shifted off the field and into the games, the feeds, the platforms, and the carts where fans actually live their relationship with the league.

99% of NBA fans never make it to a live game. 45% of Roblox sports gameplay happens off-season. Athletes drive purchase decisions that team loyalty alone cannot explain. Commerce media is on track to claim nearly a quarter of US digital ad spend.

The brands that build for this reality will own the next decade of sports fandom. Everyone else will keep paying more for less.

How is your brand thinking about the shift from stadium-and-broadcast to game-and-commerce? Where are you seeing the strongest signals of the new playbook? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining is your front-row seat to the convergence of gaming, technology, and entertainment, written for the brand and strategy leaders shaping what comes next. If you found this useful, subscribe to get every issue delivered to your inbox.

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Make no mistake: this first edition has clear opportunities to evolve in future iterations. The foundation, however, is undeniable. From EA CEO Andrew Wilson taking the main stage to skateboarding legend Tony Hawk holding court, iicon 2026 already feels like a fixture on the calendar.

I had the privilege of delivering a keynote on my book Press Play, walking through how brands can seize the generational opportunity that video games represent. More on that toward the end. First, let me share what I took away from the conversations that defined the event.

Here’s the bigger picture: every major media, tech, and consumer business in the room is making the same bet at the same time. Gaming has become the connective tissue of the next decade of entertainment.

Andrew Wilson on the Golden Age of Entertainment

EA’s Andrew Wilson opened the conference with a thesis that framed the entire two days. “We live in the golden age of entertainment.” The world sits at a critical technological inflection point, and in his view, game developers and publishers “have to be deliberate about it.”

Wilson projects the global gamer population will reach 5 billion within the next decade. Think about that scale for a moment. More than half the humans alive will be gamers.

Scale is only half the story. Wilson’s vision for the future of entertainment centers on worlds built around IP, with multi-modal forms of content and engagement. Active consumption, passive consumption, social play, short form, long form. Each format has a reason to exist because each caters to a different consumer need at a different moment in their day.

For brands, the implication is clear. The battle has shifted from owning a single touchpoint to showing up across the full surface area of a fan’s relationship with a piece of IP.

Take-Two’s Strauss Zelnick on GTA VI and Brand Partnerships

The most anticipated entertainment release of the decade is still on track. Grand Theft Auto VI is set to launch in November this year, and Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick was the most pressed executive at the event.

When asked when the marketing campaign would begin, Zelnick offered the kind of answer only he can deliver. “Soon.”

What he was willing to discuss: brand partnerships. Take-Two will be highly selective about which brands enter the GTA VI universe.

“We need to stay true to the underlying franchise and our players, because they have a sixth sense for when things are off.”

That sixth sense is the thing brands need to internalize. Players have been trained over decades to detect inauthentic intrusion. The bar for partnership in a franchise of this magnitude has never been higher.

Zelnick did open another door. Take-Two’s mobile arm Zynga is coming off a stellar year, and with mobile gaming remaining the fastest-growing segment of the entertainment business, Zynga is well positioned to accelerate by making it easy for brands to embed themselves in mobile titles. Watch this space closely.

Netflix Gaming: The Last Screen Becomes the First Screen

Netflix’s gaming strategy is the most misunderstood narrative in entertainment right now. After a couple of years of public skepticism, the company’s gaming GM Alain Tascan came to iicon to recalibrate the conversation.

Tascan was direct.

“We want to entertain the world. Without gaming, you can’t really fulfill that promise.”

His core insight: consumers increasingly demand convenience and seamless consumption. With Netflix reaching 800 million viewers globally, the strategic goal is to expand fandom through games.

Picture this scenario. You finish the season of your favorite Netflix show. The last screen of the show becomes the first screen of the video game built in that same universe. You stay inside the world. You keep creating, keep exploring, keep paying attention.

Netflix has a fresh batch of original games launching this year. The commitment is real, the budget is real, and the strategic thesis lines up with where consumer behavior is already heading.

Amazon Luna: The Ecosystem Play That Could Finally Land

Amazon arrived at iicon with a message about Luna, its re-released cloud gaming platform. Luna is being positioned as the connective hub between Twitch, Amazon Games, and Amazon Prime, opening cross-pollination of use cases across the Amazon entertainment stack.

The pattern matches what Netflix is building. You watched Invincible, and Luna serves you an offer to play the game. You streamed a Twitch broadcast, and Luna lets you jump into the same title with one click. Prime membership becomes the wrapper that ties it all together.

For brands accustomed to thinking about Amazon as a retail channel, this is a meaningful expansion. The company is building toward a single integrated entertainment ecosystem with games as the engagement engine.

Yahoo! Enters the Chat

I’ll admit it: Yahoo making a serious gaming push was not on my 2026 bingo card.

The numbers tell the story. Yahoo still reaches 250 million users per month. Younger audiences are flowing back to the brand, drawn in by nostalgia and a refreshed product surface. People come for email, news, and finance, and they stay for daily habits.

Games are a natural extension of those habits. Yahoo wants to increase engagement and reach new audiences through games. The early signal is promising: their puzzle title Crushable has seen 120% growth in its daily active user base since launch.

A new slate of original games arrives later this year. The audience is already there. The potential is real.

Press Play: Why Brands Cannot Afford to Sit This Out

In my keynote on Press Play, I left the room with a question I want to leave with you as well. If gaming is going to reach 5 billion people, sit at the center of every major streamer’s growth strategy, define how IP gets monetized, and become the connective tissue between Amazon, Netflix, Yahoo, and every major consumer platform, what is your brand’s position in that world?

The window for figuring this out is closing. The brands that engaged with gaming early, deliberately, and with genuine respect for player communities are now reaping the benefits. The brands still waiting for a clearer signal will find that the signal arrived years ago.

Gaming defines the strategic environment of the next decade. Treat it accordingly.

What This Means for Decision Makers

Five takeaways from iicon 2026 that should land on every CMO’s and brand strategy leader’s desk.

The gaming audience is reaching universal scale. A 5 billion player forecast within the decade demands repositioning at the C-suite level. Working-team curiosity will fall short.

IP-driven worlds are the emerging media format. Wilson, Tascan, Zelnick, and Amazon’s leadership all described the same architecture from different angles. The unit of strategy has shifted from titles to worlds, from campaigns to engagement loops.

Mobile is the fastest pathway in. Zynga’s brand integration roadmap will be one of the most important developments to watch in 2026 and 2027, especially for brands with shorter creative production cycles and direct-to-consumer ambitions.

Player authenticity is the price of entry. Take-Two’s partnership philosophy reflects the rule across the entire industry. The brands that win in gaming look and feel native to the worlds they enter.

Cross-platform ecosystems are crystallizing fast. Amazon, Netflix, and Yahoo are each building stacks where games anchor the engagement loop. The next 18 months will define which ecosystem strategies actually scale.

iicon 2026 was the first edition. Based on the conversations I had with executives across the industry, the next one is going to be unmissable.

What was your biggest takeaway from iicon, or what did you wish had been on the agenda? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining is your front-row seat to the convergence of gaming, technology, and entertainment, written for the brand and strategy leaders shaping what comes next. If you found this useful, subscribe to get every issue delivered to your inbox.

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Games are still an afterthought. They shouldn’t be.

The gap between where consumers actually spend their time and where brand leaders deploy their budgets is now the single largest strategic blind spot in modern marketing. And that gap is widest in mobile gaming.

The report from EMARKETER and Admazing, published last month, lays out the disconnect in numbers that should make every marketing leader uncomfortable. I’ve been writing about the gaming opportunity for years. This study finally puts the math on the table. It shows marketing leaders still haven’t got the memo.

The 27-12-10 Problem

Let me give you three numbers that, placed side by side, tell the whole story of why most brands are behind the eight ball on gaming.

First: 26.9%. That is the share of total US media ad spend going to social networks in 2026, according to EMARKETER. Out of $463.93 billion in projected total US media ad spend this year, roughly $124.88 billion is headed to Meta, TikTok, X, Snap, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

Second: 12.5%. That is the share of total time consumers spend on social platforms relative to all their media consumption. EMARKETER expects that gulf to widen.

Third: 10.2%. That is the percentage of marketers who say their organizations regularly use mobile gaming for brand campaigns. One in ten. The other nine sit somewhere on a spectrum of inaction: 37.0% rarely consider it, 28.7% deprioritize it in planning, and over a third of B2B/B2C marketers neither use nor actively consider mobile gaming at all.

Put those three numbers together and the picture is clear. Brands are allocating more than double their audience’s actual attention share to social. They are leaving the channel where the audience increasingly lives almost completely alone.

More than half of the US population, 54.4% according to EMARKETER’s October 2025 forecast, will be a mobile phone gamer in 2026. Mobile gaming is a mass medium. It reaches more Americans than Netflix. More than the NFL. More than any single social platform.

Only 2.1% of total digital ad spend is flowing to it.

Why Brand Leaders Keep Missing This

I have had versions of this conversation with dozens of CMOs, brand directors, and heads of strategy over the past year, at Cannes, at Advertising Week, in private client workshops. The reasons brand leaders stay on the sidelines fall into three categories, and each of them has become outdated.

The first is perception. A lingering assumption, rooted in the early 2010s, pictures gamers as a narrow demographic of young men playing hardcore console titles. That picture has been wrong for at least a decade. Candy Crush, Royal Match, Coin Master, Roblox, and Monopoly Go pulled mobile gaming into the mainstream. Yory Wurmser, Principal Analyst at EMARKETER, put it plainly in the report: “Most people in this country are gamers, as are the majority of internet users worldwide.”

The second is historical measurement weakness. This one had teeth. When Apple rolled out iOS 14.5 in 2021 and deprecated the IDFA, the mobile gaming ad ecosystem effectively had its tracking infrastructure cut off at the knees. Attribution, audience signals, and campaign measurement all took a hit. For two or three years, even marketers who wanted to lean into gaming struggled to prove it worked.

The third is budgetary inertia. Media mix decisions are rarely made from scratch. Last year’s plan becomes this year’s starting point, and social and CTV are already locked into the template. Gaming stays out of the conversation because it was out of last year’s conversation. Only 28.7% of marketers even consider mobile gaming alongside core channels, per the EMARKETER/Admazing survey. The rest treat it as optional, experimental, or invisible.

All three of those reasons have collapsed.

The Measurement Argument Is Over

The biggest structural objection to mobile gaming was always measurement. That objection has been retired.

Last year, the Interactive Advertising Bureau released its Gaming Measurement Framework, giving the industry its first standardized benchmarks for in-game ads, rewarded ads, and interstitial ads. Kantar, Circana, DISQO, and the MRC-accredited measurement vendors have all invested heavily in gaming-specific brand lift and outcomes lift methodologies. The ecosystem has matured.

The results these new tools are producing should stop any skeptical marketing leader in their tracks. Pedro Sánchez López, Senior Director of Brand and Media at Kantar, shared a stat in the EMARKETER report that deserves to be printed on a poster in every CMO’s office: mobile gaming ad campaigns deliver purchase intent 3.5 times stronger than the US norm, with a 7.1 percentage point lift.

Three and a half times the purchase intent lift of the US norm. Let that sink in.

López also tracked a shift I have been seeing anecdotally for years. Consumer receptivity to gaming ads has moved from 25% in 2012 to 54% in 2025. The audience welcomes the ads, provided the ads fit the gameplay moment (the second part - authenticity - is crucial and something most brands get wrong).

Erika Digirolamo, Vice President of Media Solutions at Circana, framed the measurement evolution directly. Measurement quality in mobile gaming has moved from basic awareness and engagement metrics to reliably connecting ad exposure to incremental business outcomes. Circana, Kantar, Nielsen, and ComScore now measure mobile gaming with the same rigor they apply to CTV and linear television.

Attention quality, the metric that has become the new currency of brand media, is where mobile gaming outperforms. 86.1% of marketers in the EMARKETER/Admazing survey called attention quality at least moderately important. Mobile gaming, particularly rewarded video, is engineered for attention. The player opts in. The player receives value. The player watches. Rewarded ads landed as the top-performing format in the survey, with 40.7% of marketers naming it their most successful mobile gaming format.

AI Is Closing the Gap Faster Than Brands Are Catching Up

The measurement argument has closed. The creative argument is closing next.

Generative and agentic AI tools are collapsing the production cost of gaming-native creative. Historically, a brand that wanted to show up in a mobile game needed bespoke creative for playables, rewarded video, and interstitials. That investment made gaming feel like an expensive side quest for most marketing teams.

Eddy Prado, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Admazing, described the shift: “AI is helping mobile gaming align with the standards brand marketers expect: clearer measurement, faster creative iteration, and more disciplined budget allocation.” Wurmser echoed the point from the EMARKETER side. Dynamic creative is getting better and cheaper, and personalization at scale has arrived.

Pair that with what AI is doing on the game development side. Studios are shipping more finely tuned titles faster, which means more inventory. More inventory with better targeting and dynamic creative produces a flywheel. The early brands to scale up their gaming buys are about to have a compounding advantage over the ones still treating the channel as experimental.

The Leaders Are Already In

Some brand leaders are already on the right side of this curve. Wendy’s has spent years building presence inside Fortnite and Twitch, showing up where their Gen Z audience actually is. Walmart and Nike launched experiences inside Roblox that reached tens of millions of young shoppers. Hasbro has leaned into Monopoly Go as a billion-dollar IP extension. Mattel licensed Barbie into Roblox and mobile titles ahead of the movie launch. Chipotle, Chevrolet, Coca-Cola, and Stanley have all run in-game campaigns in the past 18 months, and the measurement reports coming out of those campaigns are what is driving the renewed conversations I am having in boardrooms this year.

Your Game Plan, If You Run Marketing at a Consumer Brand

If you are running marketing, brand, or strategy at a meaningful consumer-facing business, here is what I would do this quarter.

1. Audit your media mix against actual consumer attention. If your share of spend on social exceeds your target audience’s share of time on social by more than 10 percentage points, you have a misallocation problem. Name it and fix it.

2. Carve out an incrementality test budget for mobile gaming, somewhere between 3% and 5% of your digital spend. Leverage tools like Solsten to understand what mobile games your target audience already plays, and how to best show up this in those environments. Partner with a measurement provider like Kantar, Circana, or Nielsen to run a proper brand lift and outcomes lift study against your existing social and CTV buys.

3. Prioritize rewarded video and playable formats for your first wave. They carry the attention quality and creative flexibility that travel cleanly from your existing brand campaigns. Depending on your games of choice, pick a partner. Overwolf and Superleague Gaming are great options.

4. Build an AI-native creative pipeline for gaming. If you are still commissioning gaming creative the way you commissioned a TV spot in 2015, you are leaving the compounding returns on the table. Lean into tools like Elaris that has helped brand leaders increase conversion rates for in-game ads by up to 50%.

The brands that move in 2026 will establish a beachhead before mobile gaming ad inventory gets repriced upward. The ones that wait will pay more for the same audience in 2028.

The disconnect between where consumers spend their time, attention, and dollars, and where brand leaders deploy their budgets, has become indefensible. The data is on the table. The measurement tools are in the market. The audience is waiting inside the games.

The question isn’t whether brands need to shift their budgets to gaming. The question is who will move the fastest and with the most conviction.

Are you meeting your consumers where they actually are, or are you still pouring budget into the platforms that dominated last decade’s media plan? What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining is a weekly briefing on how gaming, technology, and entertainment are reshaping brand strategy for decision-makers at the world’s biggest brands. Next week, I’ll be giving a keynote at the iicon conference, where top executives across gaming, entertainment, sports, and brands come together to shape the world of consumer engagement. I’ll be sharing important insights from behind closed doors - so be sure to subscribe below to not miss out.

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Gaming is destroying this assumption in real time.

That’s the opportunity. But there’s a version of the gaming opportunity that brands keep misreading, and I’ve watched some very smart marketing leaders spend very significant budgets on it. Getting this right requires understanding not just why gaming works, but exactly where the current conventional approach breaks down.

Gaming offers something no other medium has ever managed: genuine intimacy at scale. But only if you build it the right way.

What Gaming Does That No Other Medium Can

Start with a question that sounds simple but isn’t: what is the difference between watching a Travis Scott concert and attending one?

In April 2020, 12.3 million people were simultaneously inside Fortnite for his Astronomical event, a Guinness World Record for the largest music concert in a video game. Across all five time-zone-staggered showings, 45.8 million players experienced it. By any traditional media metric, this is a broadcast event. The numbers dwarf most television audiences for live music.

Ask anyone who was there, inside the game rather than watching a stream, and they will describe it the way they describe being somewhere, not watching something. They had a squad. They had a position in the world. When the sky turned inside out and Scott’s giant avatar moved through the landscape, they were moving too. The camera was not fixed. The perspective was theirs.

This is the quality that makes gaming categorically different as a brand medium: it places people in a state of play, and in a state of play, human beings are cognitively and emotionally present in a way that passive consumption cannot replicate. The neuroscience is well-established. Play engages agency, identity, and reward circuits simultaneously. When a brand enters a gaming environment, it becomes part of the world the player is inhabiting.

That is why the Travis Scott event felt intimate despite its scale. That is why Balenciaga’s Fortnite collection launch generated genuine fashion press, not gaming press. That is why Nike’s in-game sneakers are coveted rather than ignored. The brand arrives as something you wear, use, or experience in a context of self-expression and identity. The interaction is personal, mediated by play, even when millions of others are doing the same thing simultaneously.

Scale and intimacy are not a trade-off in gaming. They are features of the same architecture.

Why the Default Approach Is Failing Brands

Here is where I need to be direct, because I think the current standard approach to gaming is producing cautionary tales rather than competitive advantages.

The most common first move for an enterprise brand entering gaming right now is to build an experience on Roblox. I understand why. Roblox has a young, engaged audience, the barrier to entry is relatively low, the press coverage of brand activations is reliable, and it feels like being in the right place at the right time. For some objectives, it makes sense.

But I have spoken directly with a marketing leader at a global beauty brand who told me something that every CMO considering this path should hear. They spent $200,000 on a Roblox integration. When it launched, they received virtually no data from Roblox on who engaged with it, how they engaged, where they came from, or what happened next. Some brand awareness metrics moved. Beyond that, the learnings were nearly zero. The investment, in terms of actionable intelligence about their audience, returned almost nothing.

This is structural, not an execution failure. As Digiday has reported extensively, the lack of third-party measurement on Roblox has been a persistent and growing problem for advertisers, with agency executives finding it increasingly difficult to convince new brands to invest without independent verification of results. Roblox offers first-party data from its own ad server, but there is no Nielsen, no Comscore, no external validation of what the platform claims about your outcomes.

The aggregation trap I described in Part One of this series applies inside gaming too. Roblox needs brands to make its platform feel culturally alive and commercially credible. Sharing meaningful audience data with those brands would reduce their platform dependency. So it doesn’t. The incentives are identical to every other platform aggregator, even if the medium is different.

In case you missed it - Parts One and Two in this series

The beauty brand’s $200,000 bought them a presence. It did not buy them knowledge. And without knowledge, there is no compounding value, no ability to reach those players again, no understanding of who they were, no data to inform the next decision.

What Sega Understands About This Problem

I recently spoke with an executive at Sega, the company behind one of gaming’s most enduring cultural properties: Sonic the Hedgehog. Sonic commands genuine love across generations, an IP with the kind of authentic resonance that most brands spend decades and enormous budgets trying to manufacture.

And yet, from a distribution standpoint, Sega faces a version of the same trap that every brand building on third-party platforms faces. Their games live on PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and Steam. Their relationship with fans is mediated by platform holders who set the terms of discovery, pricing, and access. The IP is exceptional. The ownership of the audience relationship is not.

“IP without distribution is a rented asset. You can build something genuinely beloved and still find yourself dependent on someone else’s willingness to let you reach the people who love it.”

This is the paradox the gaming industry itself is grappling with. It illuminates exactly the right question for any brand operating in this space: what does it mean to own a relationship with your audience, and what are you actually building toward if you don’t?

A Portfolio Framework That Actually Works

Based on my work advising enterprise brands on gaming strategy, here is the framework I believe produces the best outcomes. It is deliberately a portfolio approach, not a single bet.

The first move is to experiment on third-party platforms including Roblox, but with clear-eyed expectations and a data strategy built into the commercial agreement before you sign anything. Negotiate what data you will receive, in what format, and with what frequency. If a platform will not commit to meaningful data sharing in the contract, that tells you something important about the nature of the relationship you are entering. This is not necessarily a reason to walk away, but it is a reason to calibrate your investment accordingly and to be honest internally about what success looks like when learning is structurally constrained.

The second move, and this is where most enterprise brands are significantly underinvesting, is to partner with established mobile game publishers who already have the audience you want to reach. Mobile gaming reaches more people than console and PC combined. Unlike Roblox or Fortnite, a partnership with a mobile game publisher can be structured as a commercial deal where data access is a negotiable term. You are agreeing to terms, not accepting platform defaults. That distinction is significant. It means you can require, as a condition of the partnership, that you receive player data that makes the investment meaningful: purchase intent signals, cohort behaviour, retention patterns. The kind of intelligence that tells you whether your brand changed anything, not just whether people saw it.

The third move is the most strategically important, and the one that most directly addresses the aggregation problem: use your own brand and IP to build games or gamified content for the audiences you already reach. This is a call to stop treating games as someone else’s medium and start treating your brand as the platform. If you have an existing direct audience through email, through loyalty programmes, through owned communities, you have the foundation for a gaming experience that you control, that generates data you own, and that deepens relationships with people already invested in your brand. The intimacy is real because the relationship pre-exists the game. The data is yours because you built the environment.

This is the thread connecting back to the broader series argument. The brands that escape the aggregation trap are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones that recognise their existing owned audience as the most valuable starting point, and invest in deepening those relationships through experiences that cannot be intermediated by anyone else.

The Standard Every Brand Should Hold Itself To

Gaming represents one powerful expression of something more fundamental: the shift from renting attention to building relationships. The brands that understand gaming understand this instinctively, because gaming makes it impossible to hide behind impression counts and reach metrics. Either the player is engaged, actively, willingly, on their own terms, or they are not.

That standard: genuine, chosen engagement from an audience that knows what it is doing when it shows up, is the standard every brand should hold its entire distribution strategy to. In games. In everything.

The platform trap is real. The acquisition playbook, as I described in Part Two, is available at various scales to anyone willing to think structurally about distribution. The intimacy at scale that gaming demonstrates is achievable. But only if you build it the right way, own the data that comes from it, and resist the temptation to confuse a presence on someone else’s platform for a relationship of your own.

Are you applying the same scrutiny to your gaming investments that you would apply to any other major marketing commitment? What would your data tell you if you asked? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining covers business strategy at the intersection of gaming, technology, and entertainment. This is Part Three of a three-part series on brand distribution, audience ownership, and the future of the attention economy. If this was forwarded to you, subscribe below to get every future issue directly.

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In case you missed it - Part One of Three

The natural response to that argument is: fine, so what does the alternative actually look like?

The answer is becoming clearer, and it looks less like a content strategy and more like an acquisition strategy. The most strategically sophisticated organisations operating right now are buying direct lines to audiences that no platform can intermediate. They are purchasing the doorway, not just what’s behind it.

Three organisations have demonstrated this clearly, across three different industries, with three very different acquisition targets. The logic underneath all of them is identical.

Case Study One: The New York Times Buys a Daily Ritual

When the New York Times acquired Wordle in January 2022 for a price reported to be in the low seven figures, the coverage largely framed it as a quirky cultural moment. A newspaper, struggling with the existential pressures facing legacy media, buys a word game that had gone viral. The strategic significance was largely missed.

What the Times purchased was not a game. It was a daily ritual shared by tens of millions of people who had never previously had a reason to visit a New York Times product. Wordle gave the company something that subscription marketing cannot buy and advertising cannot manufacture: habitual, direct contact with a new audience at a moment of their day when they were already engaged, already open, and already forming a behavioural pattern around the experience.

The strategic sequel is the more important part of this story. Wordle became the entry point to a broader Times Games ecosystem, alongside Connections, Spelling Bee, and the Mini Crossword, that has become a powerful engine for subscription conversion. The Times is selling a daily habit that, over time, makes the broader Times offering feel indispensable. They built a conversion funnel by buying a ritual.

The platform cannot disintermediate that. There is no algorithm between the Times and its puzzle player. The relationship is direct, daily, and owned. It’s been the most powerful driver of digital revenue growth and subscriber stickiness for the Times that I dedicated an entire section to them in my book on gaming strategies for brands.

Case Study Two: OpenAI Buys a Voice in the Conversation

OpenAI’s acquisition of TBPN, announced in April 2026, looks unusual on the surface. An artificial intelligence laboratory buying a daily tech talk show. The strategic logic becomes obvious once you stop thinking about TBPN as media and start thinking about it as distribution infrastructure for narrative control.

OpenAI is operating in the middle of one of the most contested reputation battles in the history of technology: a fight over what artificial general intelligence means, who benefits from it, who is harmed by it, and who should be trusted to build it. Every major publication, every tech commentator, every YouTube channel with an opinion has a platform from which to shape that narrative. Before TBPN, OpenAI had to rely on earned coverage, which means relying on editors, journalists, and algorithm decisions made by platforms it doesn’t control.

TBPN changes that. The show generated approximately $5 million in advertising revenue in 2025 and was on track to exceed $30 million this year, according to reporting from TechCrunch. That tells you something significant about the audience’s size and quality. More importantly, it gives OpenAI a direct audio channel into the ears of the founder and operator class that shapes tech culture. No editorial filter. No algorithm. No platform that could bury or amplify coverage based on its own commercial incentives.

“Narrative is a competitive asset. Relying on third-party media to carry your story is a form of distribution risk.”

This move echoes something Andreessen Horowitz has been building systematically for years. a16z has constructed a media infrastructure: podcasts, newsletters, and a media fellowship that trained 65 storytellers in its inaugural cohort, with a second cohort launching in April 2026. The goal is direct access to an audience of founders and operators who subscribe. If a16z’s views on tech regulation, AI, or cryptocurrency are filtered through a reporter who frames them differently, that is a loss. If they publish directly to the people who matter to their business, that is leverage.

This is a distribution ownership strategy wearing media’s clothes. The distinction matters.

Case Study Three: Disney Buys a World

The most ambitious articulation of this thesis involves two of the most recognisable names in entertainment.

In February 2024, Disney invested $1.5 billion to acquire an equity stake in Epic Games, the company behind Fortnite, and announced a multiyear partnership to build what they described as an “expansive and open games and entertainment universe.” On paper, this looks like a content deal: Disney IP inside an Epic platform. Marvel characters in Fortnite. Star Wars experiences. Avatar activations. That reading is too narrow.

Fortnite has over 300 million registered users and a cultural gravity that makes it a persistent social space, somewhere people inhabit regularly and with genuine emotional investment. Unreal Engine is the infrastructure layer powering a growing proportion of interactive entertainment globally. Epic Online Services provides identity, social graph, and cross-platform connectivity for millions of players across dozens of titles.

Disney, meanwhile, owns the most powerful IP portfolio in the history of entertainment (Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar, Disney Animation, Avatar) and distributes it almost entirely through platforms and theatres it doesn’t control. Disney+ is the closest thing to owned distribution the company has, and it has faced sustained commercial pressure as the streaming wars have matured. In cinemas, in streaming, in social media: Disney is a content creator dependent on aggregators for reach.

The Epic stake changes that strategic frame. Follow the logic of this partnership to its conclusion, and you arrive at a scenario where Disney owns the interactive world that hundreds of millions of people inhabit. A persistent digital environment where the next generation of fans grows up alongside Disney IP as something they do, rather than something they watch.

That is the escape from aggregation at its most complete. Disney would own the platform where the relationship between its characters and the next generation of fans is formed. No streaming deal. No algorithm. No theatrical window to negotiate.

Why Disney Should Acquire Epic Games

The Common Thread

Three case studies, three different industries, three very different acquisition targets. The logic underneath all of them is identical.

Wordle is a daily ritual. TBPN is a direct audio channel into the founder class. Fortnite is a persistent social world with 300 million registered users. None of these can be intermediated by a third-party platform. None of them can be algorithmically deprioritised. None of them can have their reach revised downward in the next quarterly update.

What all three organisations did was stop thinking about distribution as a function of content strategy and start thinking about it as infrastructure. The question they asked was not about creative quality or channel mix. It was this: what do we need to own in order to reach the people we want to reach, without asking anyone’s permission?

That question is available to every brand to ask. The answer will look different depending on your category, your audience, and your resources. But the framing is universal. The brands that win the next decade will be the ones that understood, early enough, that the platform is the prize.

The next question is obvious: what does this look like when you don’t have $1.5 billion to spend on a games company? That’s the third piece.

Where does acquisition-led distribution thinking fit inside your organisation’s strategy today? Is it even a conversation at the leadership level? Let me know in the comments.

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I’ve spent years working with some of the world’s most recognised brands on their audience and distribution strategies. The single most dangerous misconception I encounter is the belief that building an audience on a platform is the same as owning one. It isn’t. And if the events of the last few years haven’t made that clear, the next few years will.

The follower count is a dependency, owned entirely by someone else, on terms set by someone else. And those terms can change overnight.

“The greatest trick platforms ever pulled was convincing brands that reach was the same as relationship.”

What Your Social Following Actually Is

Let me be direct about what your Instagram following actually is. It is a list of people who, at some point, pressed a button on a platform that doesn’t belong to you. They receive your content at a frequency the platform decides, in a format the platform chooses, delivered to a percentage of them the platform controls. You have zero obligation from the platform to tell you who they are, what they want, or where they go when they leave.

You are borrowing a relationship, on terms set by someone else.

Those terms have changed overnight. Repeatedly. Facebook’s organic reach collapsed from roughly 16% in 2012 to under 6% by 2014, a change that wiped out years of audience-building investment for thousands of brands in a single algorithm update. TikTok’s ban scare in early 2025 was a different kind of wake-up call. For a few days, brands with millions of followers confronted a very simple question: if this platform disappears tomorrow, how do I reach these people? The answer, for almost every brand, was the same. They couldn’t. Because they didn’t have email addresses. They didn’t have phone numbers. They had a follower count, and follower counts are not portable.

This is a structural feature of how these platforms are designed to work. It is not an oversight.

Why the Trap Is Built Into the Business Model

In 2015, technology strategist Ben Thompson published what has become one of the most useful frameworks for understanding how digital platforms accumulate power. He called it Aggregation Theory.

The core argument: in the internet era, the companies that win are the ones that control demand rather than supply. Aggregators (Google, Meta, TikTok, Amazon) win by owning the consumer relationship. Once they have that, suppliers, meaning anyone who needs access to those consumers, have no choice but to come to the platform on the platform’s terms. Over time, aggregators can commoditise and replace those suppliers, because any individual supplier is replaceable. The aggregator is not.

Brands are the suppliers in this framework. Every time you invest in growing an audience on someone else’s platform, you are deepening your dependency on an aggregator with no structural incentive to treat you as a partner.

Consider the information asymmetry in practice. TikTok knows which of your followers are 24-year-old women in Manchester who watch beauty content late at night and are in the market for a new moisturiser. They know when those people churn, who they follow instead, what competitor content they engage with. You know your follower count and your average view duration. That gap is not incidental. It is the source of the platform’s entire business model.

The Relationship Was Always Adversarial

The most persistent aspect of this dynamic is that it is disguised as cooperation. Platforms actively court brands. They hold conferences, publish case studies, offer managed service teams. They want your content because it attracts and retains users. They want your ad spend because it funds their business. They need you.

Needing you and sharing power with you are entirely different things. As Thompson noted in his follow-up analysis, suppliers to aggregators face a fundamental structural problem: even when aggregators genuinely depend on them, the aggregator’s control of the consumer interface means suppliers can be played off against each other. There is always another brand willing to create content. There is always another advertiser willing to buy reach.

The platform’s data moat is the product. The incentive for a platform to share meaningful audience data with you is structurally negative. If you understood your audience deeply enough to reach them directly, you would need the platform less. That is precisely why you don’t get that data.

The Measurement Problem Is Getting Worse

What makes this dynamic increasingly urgent is that the platforms’ data advantage is compounding faster than most brands’ ability to respond. As AI-mediated discovery grows through tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews, a new layer of aggregation is forming that is even more opaque than social media.

On Instagram or TikTok, a brand can maintain a presence, publish content, and build a following. In AI-mediated search, there is no profile page. There is no follower count. There is either relevance or invisibility, determined by systems you cannot see and cannot directly influence.

The brands that spent a decade optimising for search, building content libraries and SEO strategies, are watching organic traffic collapse as AI answers replace link clicks. One platform dependency was traded for another, and now that second dependency is being eroded by a third.

The Question Every Brand Needs to Answer Now

I am not arguing that brands should abandon social platforms or stop investing in reach. These channels have genuine value and, for many categories, represent the most efficient way to grow awareness at scale. The error is treating them as a destination rather than a funnel, and confusing rented audience with owned audience.

The question every brand needs to sit with is this: if the three platforms you rely on most changed their algorithm, raised their ad prices by 40%, or disappeared tomorrow, what would you have left? What direct relationships do you own? What data do you hold? Who can you reach without asking someone else’s permission?

Most brands, if they answer honestly, will find the answer unsettling. And that unsettling feeling is worth something. Because the brands figuring this out are not waiting for the next platform shock to motivate them. They are taking structural action now, acquiring the means of distribution itself.

That is what the next piece is about - brands that are buying the doorway to reduce their dependency on these platforms.

Have you done an honest audit of what audience you truly own, versus what you are renting? What did you find? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining covers business strategy at the intersection of gaming, technology, and entertainment. If this was forwarded to you, subscribe below to get every issue directly.

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March 24: Epic Games announced it was laying off 1,000 people alongside a transformation program that aims to realize an additional $500 million in cost savings. Epic is making these deep cuts amid lackluster engagement numbers in its flagship game Fortnite. Still, for a company that has been known for loose budgets and spending habits, this marks a remarkable shift in execution and fiscal responsibility - something Epic Games’ investor base will certainly appreciate. Which brings us to Disney.

Later the same day: OpenAI announced it would refocus all of its efforts on code and the performance of its core models. In other words: Anthropic is running away from us. No more playtime for. That led to the company shutting down its Sora application, for which Disney had signed a $1 billion deal. The team around Disney’s new CEO Josh D’Amaro waited seven days, until March 31, to cancel its deal with OpenAI and pull back.

In a span of seven days, the worlds of gaming and entertainment seemed to have been turned upside down. It felt like someone shook the snow globe so hard that the scenery resembled an Arctic storm more than a peaceful winter wonderland. Now that the “snow” is starting to settle and clarity is taking over, a new possible reality emerged that I have been advocating for a long time.

Disney is rumored to be contemplating an acquisition of Epic Games.

Finally.

An opportunity this compelling for both sides in a transaction rarely comes around.

I have spoken to people on the inside of both companies over the past week, as well as industry insiders close to them. These are more than rumors - Disney is seemingly actively evaluating a potential deal to buy Epic Games. Given the recent layoffs and challenging performance, any deal will certainly come in below Epic Games’ $32 billion peak valuation exactly four years ago, as well as its $22.5 billion valuation when Disney invested $1.5 billion in February 2024. Disney’s current market cap hovers around the $175 billion mark. Its stock price is on the same level where it was 11 years ago. Meanwhile Netflix’s stock price jumped from roughly $6 to $99 in the same period.

Disney needs a transformational event - buying Epic Games can be just that.

Here’s why I love this deal for Disney.

A Consistent Customer Journey That Connects Physical And Digital

Owning Epic Games gives Disney the ability to stretch its IP portfolio across the entire consumer journey and embed themselves along a key consumer passion point - gaming - to be always-on and always in direct engagement with consumers. Where the Parks business is the cash cow, it is a bigger barrier and cost to the consumer to access those. Worlds within Fortnite significantly reduce that barrier while increasing the monetization potential. CEO Josh D’Amaro has already revealed his intention to release new movies inside of Fortnite. The Simpsons collaboration and orchestrated rollout showed us what the future of transmedia looks like. Owning Epic Games and its flagship games gives Disney more than the ability to own video games - it would own one of the most culturally relevant real-estate and distribution channels on the planet.

Previously released articles related to this topic

Strengthening Disney’s Flywheel

Disney refers to its flywheel a lot, where digital engagement acts as a leading indicator and driver for its parks revenue. Former CEO Bob Iger described Disney+ as the portal to its parks. In 2025, Disney reported record operating income of $10 billion for its parks, which management attributed to stronger demand driven by its digital engagement and the success of digital-native franchises in physical spaces. Fortnite gives Disney a lean-in medium as opposed to streaming, which is a lean-back medium. The intensified engagement from Disney-themed Fortnite worlds will very likely translate to more streaming engagement as well as greater park revenue - considering that BCG reports an 86% conversion rate from purchases in gaming environments to physical purchases.

Intensifying Already High Consumer Passion

Disney’s NPS in early 2026 was reported at 38, significantly outperforming other media companies. Its parks perform even better at 49. Last year, 7 out of the 10 most-watched streaming shows in the US were Disney properties. Estimates have 60-80% of Gen Alpha engaging with Disney content daily. The consumer passion is strong. The ability to co-create inside gaming environments and leverage your favorite Disney characters inside Fortnite - or build part of a new park yourself - will only intensify the already strong connection consumers have to the brand. This is the playbook Disney wanted to roll out with OpenAI via its Sora app. Fortnite comes with the tools and the ecosystem for user-generated content to turn this on day one.

Building Its Digital Laboratory

Athleisure giant Adidas considers video games as their digital warehouse. A way to test new concepts at scale at very low cost and significantly shorten the supply chain and associated risks of production. For Disney, the stakes are even higher. The new Space Mountain in Tokyo Disneyland is set to cost roughly $460 million, making it one of the most expensive attractions Walt Disney Imagineering has ever created. Imagine you invest all this money to launch a new ride and have it flop. In Fortnite, Disney can create new rides and attractions at almost no marginal cost, track and understand consumer engagement in real-time, iterate on the concept - and green light it for production in the physical world when the risk of failure is practically zero.

The Risks Disney Can’t Ignore

No acquisition of this scale comes without friction. Disney’s track record with large deals is mixed. Pixar and Marvel were transformational successes. The Fox acquisition was far more complicated. Integrating a gaming company requires organizational muscle Disney has not yet built. The cultures are different, the talent expectations are different, and the speed of iteration required in gaming runs at a pace that large entertainment companies are structurally not designed for.

Epic Games’ valuation is still a negotiation. Even discounted from its peak, a deal of this size represents a meaningful portion of Disney’s $175 billion market cap. D’Amaro and his board will need to make a compelling case to shareholders that the strategic value justifies the premium.

And then there is Tim Sweeney. Epic’s founder and CEO has built one of the most influential companies in gaming with a clear vision and a willingness to fight his battles publicly - he took Apple to court over App Store fees and kept going for years. Sweeney’s continued involvement will be a defining factor in any transaction. Structuring a deal that retains his energy and creative ambition is as important as getting the price right.

What This Means for Brands

If this deal closes, it fundamentally reshapes how brands access gaming audiences. Right now, Fortnite brand deals go through Epic Games. A Disney-owned Fortnite changes the economics and the creative expectations. Brands that want access to Fortnite’s 80 million monthly active users will be negotiating with Disney’s brand partnerships team - a team that knows how to protect IP equity and will price access accordingly.

The bigger shift is strategic. Disney acquiring Epic does not just change who you negotiate with. It redefines what gaming means as a brand marketing channel. Disney’s IP management discipline combined with Fortnite’s cultural reach creates a new tier of branded entertainment. Think less “promotional activation inside a game” and more “co-authored cultural moment at global scale.”

The brands building genuine gaming competencies right now - that understand how to show up authentically in interactive environments and have a point of view on what their brand means inside a game world - will have a significant head start when this consolidation reshapes access and pricing. Passive observers will be paying premium rates for whatever inventory Disney decides to make available. Active participants will already have built the muscle.

The window to experiment cheaply and build fluency in gaming is still open. It will not stay that way much longer.

What do you think? Is a Disney acquisition of Epic Games the transformational deal both companies need, or does integrating a gaming giant into an entertainment empire create more risk than reward? Let me know in the comments.

Technically Entertaining covers business strategy at the intersection of gaming, technology, and entertainment - for the decision-makers shaping what comes next. Subscribe below to get every issue directly in your inbox.

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Niantic just revealed something that should fundamentally change how every executive thinks about the gaming industry.

The company behind Pokémon Go — the AR game that had 500 million people installing it in 60 days — sold its gaming division to Scopely last year. At the same time, it spun out a new AI company called Niantic Spatial. That company took the 30 billion images Pokémon Go players captured while hunting Pikachus across cities on every continent, and used them to build a world model that can pinpoint a location to within centimeters — without GPS. That model is now being used to help delivery robots navigate the real world.

This is not a pivot story. It is a harvest story.

Niantic built a game, deployed hundreds of millions of humans as data collectors, understood the built environment of cities at a scale no mapping company had achieved, and then sold the game when it had extracted what it needed. AppLovin did the same thing on a different axis. It built mobile games to study the relationship between ads, conversion funnels, and player behavior with a granularity no advertising platform could match from the outside. Once that intelligence was baked into its targeting algorithm, it sold the game studios to TripleDot.

To anyone who has spent real time in the gaming industry, this pattern is familiar. Games have always been the place where the hardest problems get solved first — because the stakes are low enough to iterate aggressively and the performance requirements are brutal enough to force real breakthroughs.

The question for decision makers is not whether this has happened before. It has, repeatedly, across hardware, software, behavioral science, and economics. The question is what gaming is building right now that the rest of the world will be running on in five years.

The GPU: Gaming’s Accidental Gift to AI

The most consequential technology transfer in modern history started with a graphics chip.

In 1999, NVIDIA released the GeForce 256, the first GPU specifically designed to handle the mathematical load of rendering 3D game worlds. The architecture was built for parallelism — thousands of small cores performing identical operations simultaneously rather than a few powerful cores doing tasks in sequence. The gaming industry needed this to render realistic environments at playable frame rates. What it created, without knowing it, was the foundational hardware for artificial intelligence.

The mathematics of 3D rendering — matrix multiplication, vector calculus — is identical to the mathematics of training neural networks. When researchers ran an image recognition model on two consumer NVIDIA gaming cards in 2012, they crushed every existing benchmark. The hardware that had been running Call of Duty turned out to be more capable of machine learning than the world’s most expensive supercomputers. NVIDIA’s release of CUDA in 2007 had already unlocked GPU programming for non-graphical tasks, but that 2012 result made the strategic reality impossible to ignore.

By 2018, NVIDIA introduced Tensor Cores — originally designed to upscale low-resolution game images using AI — which became the specific hardware architecture needed to train the Transformer models that power every modern large language model. The efficiency gains transformed economics: training runs that would have taken months shrank to days, making the current generative AI wave viable.

Today, GPUs are treated as a sovereign-grade strategic asset. Export restrictions. National stockpiles. Trillion-dollar market valuations. All of it traces back to the requirement that video games look good at sixty frames per second.

Game Engines: The Operating System for the Physical World

Unreal Engine and Unity started as tools for making games. They are now the infrastructure for industries that have nothing to do with games.

The reason is straightforward. Game engines solve extremely hard problems: real-time 3D rendering, physics simulation, lighting, networked state synchronization across thousands of concurrent users. Solving those problems at the performance level games demand creates tools that are simply better than anything a traditional enterprise would build for its own use case.

Film is the most visible example. The Mandalorian and The Batman replaced green screens with massive LED walls driven by Unreal Engine, rendering photorealistic parallax-correct backgrounds in real time. Post-production timelines that previously ran six to twelve months are now concurrent with filming. The virtual production market is growing at nearly 15% annually and is projected to exceed $11 billion by 2034.

Automotive is deeper. BMW and Tesla use game engines to design and prototype the digital dashboards their drivers see every day. More than half of virtual vehicle showrooms run on gaming engines. Aerodynamic simulations, ergonomic walkthroughs, HMI prototyping — all in game engines, all eliminating costly physical models before a single part is manufactured.

The most important application is robotics training. Synthetic data — artificially generated environments where every object, light source, and physical property is labeled and controllable — is now the primary solution to the data gap in physical AI. NVIDIA’s Isaac Sim, built on gaming libraries, allows developers to train robots in procedurally generated environments that simulate rare conditions impossible to capture in the physical world: extreme weather, mechanical edge cases, unusual human behaviors. The technique is called domain randomization. Game developers invented it to create visual variety. Roboticists use it to harden AI against the messiness of reality.

Virtual Economies: The Original Fintech Lab

Before anyone used the word fintech, games were running the world’s most sophisticated digital economies.

World of Warcraft and EVE Online pioneered digital scarcity, virtual currency management, and player-to-player marketplaces in the early 2000s. Game developers became, in effect, digital central bankers — managing inflation and deflation through carefully calibrated faucets (how currency enters the economy) and sinks (how it leaves). The Real Money Trade phenomenon proved that virtual labor could be reliably converted to fiat currency, establishing the foundational thesis that digital assets hold intrinsic value based on the effort required to acquire them.

This is not ancient history. The $1.5 billion creator economy on platforms like Roblox and Fortnite runs on these same mechanics. NFTs, tokenomics, burn mechanisms, decentralized exchanges — each has a direct predecessor in MMORPG design. The Roblox creator economy, Fortnite’s engagement payout pool, the IP Partner Licensing Program — these are all refinements of systems game designers built decades ago because they had no choice but to figure out how digital economies work.

What’s significant is the social dimension. On Discord alone, 41% of digital purchases are now gifted, and 25% of gift buyers are non-players engaging purely through social networks. The economy of game worlds no longer lives inside the game. It has migrated into the broader digital social fabric, taking the mechanics with it.

Behavioral Design: The Science of Human Engagement

The most underestimated technology transfer from gaming is not hardware or software. It is the science of what makes human beings do things.

Game designers spent decades solving the hardest problem in behavioral science: how do you get a person to voluntarily persist through difficulty, return day after day, and find meaning in structured challenge? The frameworks they developed — flow states, self-determination theory, variable reward schedules, social accountability systems — are now deployed across healthcare, education, finance, and enterprise software.

The results are quantifiable. Gamified health protocols have achieved medication compliance rates above 90%, significantly outperforming standard care. Surgeons trained in VR simulation built on game engines demonstrate training confidence improvements of 275% compared to traditional methods. Gamified learning platforms have demonstrated 60% improvements in information retention. Employee retention in organizations using gamified HR systems runs 69% higher.

Duolingo’s streak mechanic. Peloton’s leaderboard. Nike Run Club’s badge system. Apple Watch’s ring closure. These are all game design. The companies that built them understood something the rest of the business world is still catching up to: engagement is not a marketing problem. It is a design problem. And the people who know how to solve design problems at this level are game designers.

Human Understanding: The Psychological Dimension

All of the above — hardware, simulation, economies, behavioral mechanics — depends on one foundational input: understanding what human beings actually want, fear, value, and respond to.

This is where Solsten enters the picture.

Solsten built its proprietary psychological database by doing what no research firm had done before: interfacing directly with real players, in real gaming environments, at scale. Gaming creates uniquely honest conditions for psychological research. Players are not in a survey. They are not performing for a researcher. They are making thousands of micro-decisions under varying conditions of reward, frustration, competition, and collaboration. The behavioral signal is extraordinarily rich - and uncovering the psychology means uncovering the driver behind the behavior.

The result is a dataset that captures the psychological architecture of real human beings — their core motivations, values, and decision-making patterns — with a fidelity that traditional market research cannot approach. Not because the technology is different, but because the environment is. Gaming strips away the social performance layer that distorts every focus group and survey. People reveal who they are when they play.

That psychological database now powers decisions far beyond gaming. Understanding that a consumer is motivated by autonomy rather than status changes everything about how you design a product, price it, market it, and retain the person who bought it. Solsten’s data — built in gaming, applicable everywhere — is the human understanding layer that sits beneath every other technology on this list.

What Decision Makers Need to Understand

The Niantic story is not a curiosity. It is a template.

Gaming has always functioned as the world’s most efficient technology incubator, because the environment demands real solutions at scale. The cost of failure is a bad review. The reward for success is hundreds of millions of engaged users generating data no other industry can produce.

Every foundational technology on this list — GPUs, simulation engines, economic systems, behavioral design, psychological modeling — was built in gaming because gaming was the only environment demanding and tolerant enough to develop it.

The companies that understood this extracted enormous value. The ones that wrote gaming off as entertainment watched the infrastructure of the modern economy get built by people playing video games.

The next wave is being built right now. Spatial computing, physical AI, synthetic data at scale, real-time world models, humanization of AI. All of it is happening first in gaming.

The question is whether you’ll be paying attention this time.

Technically Entertaining covers the intersection of gaming, technology, and business strategy. If this post made you think differently about an industry you thought you understood, subscribe today and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

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I sat down with a senior partner at McKinsey at a tech conference in Munich recently, who works on AI agent implementations for Fortune 500 companies. After discussing half a dozen deployments across energy, healthcare, and financial services, he said something that stopped me cold:

“The number one complaint we hear from enterprise clients isn’t about accuracy or speed. It’s that the agents feel bland and robotic. They lack personality.”

This exact sentiment was mirrored in a room full of executives of a large European bank, where I ran a workshop on personalization, AI, and gaming.

But this shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s used Claude, ChatGPT, or pretty much any other AI assistant for more than a few minutes (except for Elaris, as this assistant actually uses real psychological data to power its models). The technology is impressive. The conversation is hollow. You’re talking to something that can process millions of tokens and reason through complex problems, but it has no idea who you are beyond what you’ve typed in the current chat.

The knee-jerk corporate response has been predictable and wrong: pre-define agent personalities. Build a suite of options.

Professional Agent.

Casual Agent.

Empathetic Agent.

Terse Agent.

Give users a choice and let them pick what works.

That’s not personalization. That’s a personality quiz from a 1990s magazine. And it fundamentally misunderstands the problem.

What’s funny to one person is offensive to another. What feels efficient to me feels cold to you. There are no objective definitions of “fun,” “nice,” or “pragmatic.” These are subjective evaluations that depend entirely on who’s receiving the message and what psychological state they’re in when they receive it.

This is why AI agents need to understand human psychology, not just mimic human personalities. And it’s why the current generation of LLMs, and even the next generation of world models, will fail to deliver true personalization without a fundamental infrastructure layer built on valid psychological data.

The LLM Limitation: Pattern Matching Without Understanding

Large language models like Claude and ChatGPT are statistical marvels. They’ve ingested billions of words and learned the patterns of human communication with stunning accuracy. They can write like Shakespeare, code like a senior engineer, and explain quantum physics like Carl Sagan.

But they don’t understand you. They understand language patterns. They know what words typically follow other words in specific contexts. They can detect sentiment in your message and adjust their tone accordingly. But that’s reactive pattern matching, not psychological understanding.

When you tell ChatGPT you’re having a bad day, it responds with empathetic language because that’s what the training data suggests is appropriate. It doesn’t know whether you’re the kind of person who wants emotional validation or practical solutions. It doesn’t understand if you’re conflict-avoidant or direct. It has no model of your cognitive preferences, your communication style, or your psychological drivers.

This creates a fundamental ceiling on personalization. LLMs can be trained to sound different. They can adopt various tones. They can even remember facts about you across conversations. But they can’t adapt to who you are psychologically because they don’t have a framework for understanding human psychology in the first place.

The result is interactions that feel generic even when they’re technically customized. The agent knows you prefer bullet points over paragraphs. It doesn’t know why you prefer them, what that preference reveals about how you process information, or how that should inform its approach to more complex interactions.

The World Model Promise: Understanding Reality, Missing Humanity

Yesterday, Meta’s former Chief AI scientist and widely considered as one of the godfathers of AI, Yann LeCun, announced his new startup AMI Labs. It has raised $1.03 billion at a $3.5 billion valuation to build world models - the largest seed round for a European startup ever. The premise is compelling: instead of training AI on language patterns, train it to understand the physical world the way humans do.

LeCun has been vocal about the limitations of LLMs, particularly their tendency to hallucinate. His proposed solution, Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA), aims to build AI that learns from reality, not just from text. World models observe the world, build representations of how it works, and can reason about it more reliably than systems trained purely on language.

AMI Labs CEO Alexandre LeBrun, formerly CEO of digital health startup Nabla, understands the stakes. In healthcare, LLM hallucinations could have life-threatening repercussions. A world model that understands medical reality more fundamentally could be transformative.

But here’s what the world model approach still misses: understanding worlds without understanding the human beings inside those worlds, whose interactions with the world and with each other shape the meaning of the world itself.

A world model might understand that a hospital room contains certain equipment, that medications have specific effects, and that medical procedures follow particular sequences. But does it understand that the patient in that room is terrified of needles because of childhood trauma? That they’re a visual learner who needs diagrams, not verbal explanations? That they make decisions collaboratively with family members rather than independently?

The world isn’t just physical reality. It’s the psychological and social reality of the humans who inhabit it. And you can’t reason effectively about human needs, preferences, or optimal interactions without a psychological model of the humans you’re serving.

World models are a step forward for AI reasoning about physical systems. They’re not sufficient for AI that needs to reason about human systems. And most valuable AI agent use cases live squarely in the human domain.

Where This Actually Matters: The BCG Reality Check

Boston Consulting Group recently analyzed mentions of “Agentic AI” on earnings calls from Q3 to Q4 2025. The results show where enterprises are actually deploying these systems.

Energy companies are talking about agentic AI at a 728% increase. Consumer businesses at 322%. Healthcare at 46%. Financial institutions at 68%. Travel and infrastructure at 124%.

These aren’t use cases where understanding physical reality is the primary challenge. They’re use cases where understanding human behavior, preferences, and psychology is the entire point.

In energy, agents are being deployed for customer service, billing inquiries, and usage optimization. Success requires understanding how different customer segments respond to pricing changes, what communication styles drive behavior change, and how to tailor recommendations to individual psychology.

In consumer businesses, agents are handling everything from product recommendations to complaint resolution. The difference between an agent that drives revenue and one that annoys customers isn’t product knowledge. It’s psychological intelligence about how to match products to personality types, how to de-escalate frustrated customers based on their communication style, and how to create experiences that feel personalized rather than algorithmic.

In healthcare, where LeBrun sees AMI Labs’ first application through Nabla, the challenge isn’t just understanding medical reality. It’s understanding patient psychology. Do they want their doctor to be authoritative or collaborative? Do they process medical information better through statistics or stories? Are they motivated by fear of consequences or hope for outcomes?

In financial services, agents are handling investment advice, fraud detection, and customer onboarding. The technology can analyze market data perfectly. But can it understand whether a client is risk-averse or risk-seeking? Whether they trust data or intuition? Whether they want detailed explanations or executive summaries?

The agent deployments that are failing aren’t failing because they lack world models. They’re failing because they lack psychological models.

What True Personalization Actually Requires

Here’s what enterprise clients are actually asking for when they complain about bland, robotic agents: they want agents that understand people the way good salespeople, therapists, and teachers understand people.

A great salesperson doesn’t have a single personality they deploy with all customers. They read the customer’s psychology and adapt. Are they analytical or emotional? Do they want to be challenged or validated? Are they motivated by gains or losses? The salesperson doesn’t consciously run through a psychological framework, but they’re intuitively doing psychological modeling in real-time.

A great therapist doesn’t treat every patient the same way. They understand that some patients need direct confrontation while others need gentle exploration. Some want homework and structure; others want free-flowing conversation. The therapeutic approach is personalized based on psychological assessment, not just symptom presentation.

A great teacher doesn’t use the same teaching style for every student. They understand learning styles, motivation patterns, and cognitive preferences. They know which students need encouragement and which need challenge, which need structure and which need freedom.

This is what personalization means in human-to-human interactions. It’s not about having different pre-defined personalities. It’s about having a psychological model of the other person that informs dynamic adaptation.

For AI agents to achieve this, they need three things current systems lack:

First, a psychological framework. Not personality types or demographic segments, but a valid model of human psychology that captures cognitive preferences, communication styles, motivation patterns, and decision-making approaches. This framework needs to be based on actual psychological research, not engineering intuitions about how humans work.

Second, real-time psychological inference. The agent needs to observe interactions and continuously update its psychological model of the user. Not just “this person is frustrated” (sentiment analysis) but “this person is conflict-avoidant and processes information visually” (psychological modeling).

Third, dynamic behavioral adaptation. Once the agent understands the user’s psychology, it needs to adjust its behavior accordingly. Not just tone and word choice, but information density, decision-making support, challenge versus validation, and dozens of other interaction variables.

This is a fundamentally different architecture than current LLMs or proposed world models. It requires a human infrastructure layer built on valid psychological data.

Why Nobody Is Building This (Yet) Except For One Startup

The reason most AI companies aren’t building psychological infrastructure is the same reason most tech companies struggle with personalization generally: it’s hard, it’s slow, and it requires expertise outside traditional engineering domains.

Building a valid psychological framework requires partnerships with psychologists, cognitive scientists, and behavioral researchers. It requires longitudinal studies, validation against real-world outcomes, and constant refinement as you learn what actually predicts successful interactions. This is exactly what AI startup Solsten has been doing for the past 8 years - take the state-of-the-art medical grade psychometric assessments methods, measure hundreds of psychological data points of millions of real consumers, and constantly refine the methods while building out the largest psychological database. This can now serve as the foundation for a human infrastructure layer that both companies and AI agents desperately need.

Real-time psychological inference requires far more sophisticated observational AI than current sentiment analysis. You’re not just detecting emotional states, you’re inferring cognitive patterns from limited interaction data. This is a much harder machine learning problem than classification tasks.

Dynamic behavioral adaptation requires agents that can fluidly adjust dozens of interaction variables based on psychological models while maintaining coherence and achieving their core objectives. This is a control problem that makes most current AI agent architectures look primitive.

But the biggest barrier is that most AI companies are focused on what’s technically impressive rather than what’s actually useful. World models are intellectually fascinating. LLMs that can pass the bar exam make great demos. But agents that understand human psychology and adapt accordingly? That’s boring infrastructure work that doesn’t generate hype.

Until enterprise clients start walking away from deals because agents feel robotic. Until consumer applications see retention fall off because users feel like they’re talking to sophisticated chatbots. Until the gap between AI capability and AI adoption becomes undeniable.

Then the infrastructure work becomes urgent.

What This Means for the Next Wave

AMI Labs raised over $1 billion to build world models. That money will fund important research into how AI can better understand physical reality. But understanding physical reality without understanding psychological reality will leave a massive gap in agent usefulness.

The companies that figure out how to build valid psychological infrastructure will have a sustainable moat. Not because the technology is impossible to replicate, but because the expertise, partnerships, and validation required take years to build. You can’t copy-paste psychological frameworks the way you can fine-tune an LLM.

For enterprises deploying agents now, the lesson is clear: stop trying to solve the personality problem with pre-defined agent types. Start investing in understanding the psychological diversity of your users and building agents that can adapt accordingly.

For AI companies building the next generation of agents, the question isn’t just “how do we make agents smarter?” It’s “how do we make agents understand humans well enough to feel personal rather than algorithmic?”

The current generation of AI can mimic personality. The next generation might understand the world. But the generation that actually transforms human-computer interaction will be the one that understands human psychology well enough to adapt to it.

We’re not there yet. And we won’t get there by accident.

What’s your experience with AI agents? Do they feel personal or robotic? Let me know in the comments.

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“Our brands were out of position with where people wanted to play.”
- Chris Cocks, CEO Hasbro

Dear Readers,

When Chris Cocks said this after becoming Hasbro CEO in 2022, he wasn’t making excuses. He was diagnosing a terminal condition. Hasbro’s stock had crashed 70% from its pandemic peak. Traditional toy sales were in freefall. The $4 billion acquisition of Entertainment One, meant to vertically integrate film and TV production, had become a financial albatross. And the company that invented modern board gaming was watching its core business die in real time.

But Cocks had a secret weapon: Wizards of the Coast, the division Hasbro had quietly acquired in 1999 for what now looks like the deal of the century. The home of Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons wasn’t just profitable. It was printing money at margins that would make software companies jealous. While physical toys struggled to break 5% operating margins, Wizards was running at 46%.

What happened next wasn’t a turnaround. It was a complete inversion of the business model. Hasbro didn’t save the toy company by making better toys. It killed the toy company and became a gaming company that happens to still make some toys on the side.

This is the story of how a 100-year-old manufacturer executed one of the most radical strategic pivots in consumer goods history. And why every other legacy brand should be paying very close attention.

The First Digital Disaster: When Hasbro Tried This Before and Failed

Hasbro’s current gaming dominance isn’t its first attempt at digital transformation. It’s actually the third. And the first two were spectacular failures that cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars and nearly two decades of wasted time.

In 1995, Hasbro launched Hasbro Interactive, a dedicated subsidiary to bring its board game portfolio to PC gaming. The strategy worked initially. Revenue grew 145% in 1997 by digitizing Monopoly, Scrabble, and Clue. Emboldened by early success, Hasbro went on an acquisition spree, buying Atari assets for $5 million, MicroProse for $70 million, and Avalon Hill for $6 million.

By 1998, Hasbro Interactive had become the third-largest video game publisher globally, with $196 million in revenue and $23 million in profit. It looked like the future. It was actually a house of cards.

The division had scaled too fast with too many concurrent projects and a bloating headcount. By 1999, despite revenue growth, it recorded a $74 million loss. When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, Hasbro’s stock plummeted 70% and the company posted its first net loss in two decades. In January 2001, Hasbro sold the entire division to French publisher Infogrames for $100 million, ending its first gaming experiment in humiliating retreat.

The lesson learned was wrong. Instead of recognizing they’d executed poorly, Hasbro concluded that internal game development was too risky. For the next 20 years, they licensed everything to external partners like Electronic Arts and collected royalties. Safe. Low-risk. Low-reward. And completely irrelevant to where gaming was actually going.

The Silent Rise of Wizards: How D&D Saved Hasbro Without Anyone Noticing

While Hasbro was licensing Monopoly to EA and watching physical toy sales stagnate, something remarkable was happening inside Wizards of the Coast. The tabletop gaming division that Hasbro had acquired in 1999 was quietly building its own digital capabilities and proving that the company’s IP could thrive in interactive formats.

Magic: The Gathering Arena launched and immediately attracted millions of players who had never touched a physical card. Dungeons & Dragons, a 50-year-old tabletop role-playing game, was experiencing a cultural renaissance driven by streaming shows like Critical Role and digital tools that made the game accessible to new audiences.

By the mid-2010s, Wizards was contributing an estimated 20% of Hasbro’s total revenue but represented a much higher percentage of actual profit. The “omni-screen” strategy emerged, where leadership began to recognize that digital gaming wasn’t secondary to physical products. It was the primary engagement driver that actually made physical products relevant.

The COVID-19 pandemic made this undeniable. In Q2 2021, Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming revenue more than doubled as consumers flocked to Magic: The Gathering Arena and D&D digital toolsets during lockdowns. While physical retail was disrupted and film production shut down, digital gaming thrived.

But Hasbro’s leadership at the time, still committed to the “Brand Blueprint” strategy of vertical integration, spent $4 billion acquiring Entertainment One to control film and TV production. The logic was that owning the entire value chain from toys to movies would create sustainable competitive advantage. The reality was that high-capital film production with unpredictable returns was the exact opposite of what the business needed.

The Cocks Revolution: Killing the Old Hasbro to Save It

When Chris Cocks became CEO in early 2022, he came from inside Wizards of the Coast. He understood something the previous leadership didn’t: Hasbro wasn’t a toy company with a successful gaming division. It was a gaming company with a dying toy problem.

Cocks introduced “Blueprint 2.0,” a complete strategic reorientation around “fewer, bigger, better” brands and a shift of all investment toward digital and licensed gaming. The eOne acquisition was recognized as a mistake. The vertical integration dream was dead. Asset-light, high-margin digital gaming was the future.

The moves came fast and decisively. In April 2022, Hasbro acquired D&D Beyond from Fandom for $146.3 million. D&D Beyond had nearly 10 million registered users and was the essential digital companion for the tabletop game. By bringing it in-house, Hasbro secured direct customer relationships and eliminated royalty payments it had been making to Fandom. The acquisition was immediately accretive.

Then came the painful but necessary surgery. In August 2023, Hasbro sold the eOne film and TV business to Lionsgate for approximately $500 million, taking a massive loss on the original $4 billion investment. But the sale retired $400 million in floating-rate debt and freed Hasbro to transition to an asset-light entertainment model where it licenses IP to partners rather than funding production.

The financial impact was immediate. While traditional toy revenue continued declining, gaming exploded. And two external licensing deals proved just how valuable Hasbro’s gaming IP had become when paired with world-class developers.

The Proof: When Two Games Made More Than Entire Toy Lines

In August 2023, Larian Studios released Baldur’s Gate 3, a massive RPG based on Dungeons & Dragons. The game was a critical and commercial phenomenon, earning Hasbro approximately $90 million in royalties with zero development risk or capital investment.

Then came Monopoly Go!, developed by Scopely for mobile. The game became the fastest mobile title in history to reach $6 billion in lifetime revenue, generating $112 million in royalties for Hasbro in 2024 alone and approximately $168 million for the full year 2025.

Think about that. Two licensed games, neither developed by Hasbro, generated over $200 million in pure profit royalties. That’s more operating profit than most of Hasbro’s physical toy brands combined. And it required virtually zero capital, no inventory risk, no manufacturing costs, and no retail distribution headaches.

This was the model. License premium IP to best-in-class developers. Collect high-margin royalties. Use that cash to fund internal development of the most strategic franchises while maintaining the asset-light approach for everything else.

Going All In: The $1 Billion Bet on Internal AAA Development

Licensing proved the value of gaming IP. But Cocks wanted more. In 2025, Hasbro unveiled “Playing to Win,” a strategy built on five pillars: leading with IP, scaling digital, expanding into new markets, optimizing the portfolio, and driving operational excellence. At the center was a massive commitment: $1 billion invested in internal AAA game development.

Hasbro established four internal studios, each tasked with building high-fidelity titles:

Archetype Entertainment, led by BioWare veterans James Ohlen and Chad Robertson, is developing Exodus, a sci-fi RPG targeting a 2027 release. This is Hasbro’s bet on creating new IP that can compete with Mass Effect and The Witcher.

Invoke Studios, formerly Tuque Games in Montreal, is working on Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons, a third-person action-adventure game also slated for 2027. This represents Hasbro’s push to expand D&D beyond turn-based RPGs into action genres.

Skeleton Key, based in Austin and led by Christian Dailey, is reportedly developing an unannounced horror project, likely leveraging Hasbro’s library of genre IP.

Atomic Arcade was working on a G.I. Joe Snake Eyes game, but in a significant setback, Hasbro closed the studio in February 2026. The project’s status remains unclear, described only as being “evaluated.”

This internal studio strategy is high-risk. AAA game development is notoriously difficult, expensive, and unpredictable. Studios regularly go over budget and miss release windows. For every Baldur’s Gate 3, there are dozens of expensive failures. Hasbro is betting it can build the talent and infrastructure to compete with established gaming giants.

The company also hedged by announcing a partnership with Saber Interactive, the studio behind Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, to co-develop a project based on a tentpole Hasbro IP, widely speculated to be Transformers. This represents a middle path between pure licensing and pure internal development.

The UGC Strategy: Meeting Players Where They Actually Are

While betting big on AAA, Hasbro simultaneously pursued a platform-agnostic UGC strategy, recognizing that younger audiences live inside Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft rather than traditional gaming or toy stores.

On Roblox, Hasbro launched Nerf Strike, which has recorded over 84 million visits. The strategy creates a bridge between physical and digital: Roblox-themed Nerf blasters include redeemable codes for virtual items, driving digital engagement while supporting physical sales.

In Fortnite, Transformers appeared through high-profile crossover packs featuring skins for Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, and Megatron. The use of Unreal Editor for Fortnite allowed community-driven maps, keeping legacy brands relevant within the world’s largest battle royale ecosystem.

Minecraft collaborations followed a narrative-driven model. The 2024 Transformers DLC offered a story-driven adventure from Earth to Cybertron with vehicle-to-robot transformation mechanics, released alongside physical Minecraft-themed Nerf blasters.

This wasn’t experimental marketing. It was strategic distribution, ensuring Hasbro’s brands remained culturally relevant in the ecosystems where Gen Alpha and Gen Z actually spend their time.

The Financial Inversion: When Gaming Becomes the Entire Company

The 2025 financial results tell the story of complete business model inversion. Hasbro reported total revenue of $4.701 billion, up 14% year-over-year. But the growth was entirely driven by one segment.

Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming saw 45% revenue growth to $2.187 billion. Operating profit grew 59% to $1.007 billion, representing nearly the entire adjusted operating profit for the company. The operating margin of 46.0% is among the highest in the gaming industry.

Magic: The Gathering finished its strongest year ever, up 59%, driven by the “Universes Beyond” strategy that integrated external IP like Lord of the Rings and Warhammer 40,000 into the game’s ecosystem.

Meanwhile, the Consumer Products segment declined 4% to $2.438 billion. Adjusted operating profit dropped 26% to just $113 million, with margins contracting to 4.6%. The traditional toy business that once defined Hasbro now barely breaks even.

The math is brutal and clear. Wizards generates $2.2 billion in revenue at 46% margins, producing over $1 billion in operating profit. Consumer Products generates $2.4 billion at 4.6% margins, producing $113 million. One division makes nearly ten times the profit of the other despite similar revenue.

Hasbro isn’t a toy company with a gaming division anymore. It’s a gaming company with a legacy toy business it hasn’t figured out how to shut down without destroying brand equity.

The Failures: When Ambition Meets Reality

The transformation hasn’t been without painful setbacks. In late 2025, Hasbro canceled “Project Sigil,” an ambitious 3D Virtual Tabletop for Dungeons & Dragons powered by Unreal Engine 5. The platform was intended to provide a high-fidelity, Baldur’s Gate 3-like experience for remote players. But internal restructuring and the realization that it was being treated as a video game rather than a utility tool led to a 90% reduction in the development team in March 2025. Servers shut down on October 31, 2026.

The closure of Atomic Arcade in February 2026 represents another setback. The loss of a dedicated studio working on G.I. Joe underscores the difficulty of managing internal AAA development in a volatile market where even established studios struggle.

These failures are expensive. But they’re also expected in AAA development. The question isn’t whether Hasbro will have more failures. It’s whether the hits will be big enough to justify the misses.

What Comes Next: The 2027 Moment of Truth

Hasbro projects mid-single-digit revenue growth and 50-100 basis points of annual operating margin improvement through 2027. For fiscal 2026, the company anticipates 3-5% revenue growth with adjusted operating margins reaching 24-25%.

A key focus is the “Seasonal Model” for Dungeons & Dragons, transitioning the tabletop game to a live-service-style release schedule beginning with the “Season of Horror” in June 2026. This move sustains community engagement and drives consistent sales of digital and physical accessories through D&D Beyond.

But 2027 is the defining year. The releases of Exodus and Warlock: Dungeons & Dragons will prove whether Hasbro’s $1 billion investment in internal studios was visionary or reckless. If these titles succeed critically and commercially, Hasbro completes its transformation from toy maker to top-tier interactive media company. If they fail, the company faces serious questions about whether it should abandon internal development entirely and return to pure licensing.

The Blueprint for Every Legacy Brand

Hasbro’s transformation reveals several principles that apply far beyond toys.

First, recognize when your core business is dead. Hasbro didn’t save itself by making better toys. It recognized that physical play patterns had fundamentally shifted and pivoted to where engagement actually happens.

Second, bet on your highest-margin assets. Wizards of the Coast was always more profitable than Consumer Products. The mistake was treating it as secondary for so long. When margins tell you where value lives, listen.

Third, asset-light beats vertical integration in volatile creative industries. The eOne acquisition looked strategic. Film and TV production looked like natural extensions. But high-capital, unpredictable creative production is the opposite of high-margin digital licensing. Hasbro learned this the expensive way.

Fourth, licensing can be as strategic as ownership. Baldur’s Gate 3 and Monopoly Go! generated over $200 million in royalties with zero development risk. The old model said you need to own and control everything. The new model says pair premium IP with world-class partners and collect pure profit.

Fifth, internal development is high-risk but necessary for strategic control. Licensing works until platform holders or publishers have too much power. Hasbro is building internal studios not because it’s safer but because it can’t afford to be entirely dependent on external partners for its most valuable franchises.

The Existential Question

Hasbro has successfully navigated the first phase of transformation. It divested the entertainment production albatross. It elevated gaming to the core strategy. It demonstrated that its IP has massive value in digital formats. And it’s investing in the capabilities to control its own destiny.

But the company faces an existential question it hasn’t fully answered: What is Hasbro if Consumer Products continues to decline?

The 2025 results suggest a future where Wizards generates $3+ billion at 45%+ margins while Consumer Products shrinks to $2 billion at sub-5% margins. At that point, why maintain the Consumer Products infrastructure at all? Why not spin it off, sell it, or simply wind it down and become a pure gaming and licensing company?

Hasbro’s leadership hasn’t articulated this endgame. They talk about “optimizing the portfolio” and “fewer, bigger, better brands.” But the financial logic points toward an eventual exit from most physical manufacturing. The brands can live through licensing. The community can engage through digital gaming. The profits flow from royalties and internal studios, not injection-molded plastic.

Chris Cocks inherited a company in crisis and turned it into a gaming powerhouse. The stock is up significantly from its 2022 lows. Margins are expanding. The gaming pipeline is robust. But the transformation isn’t complete. It’s just entering its most dangerous phase, where Hasbro has to prove it can execute AAA development at scale while managing the slow decline of the business that built the company.

2027 will tell us whether Hasbro becomes the model for how legacy brands survive digital disruption or a cautionary tale about the limits of transformation when you’re carrying a century of manufacturing baggage.

What’s your take on Hasbro’s strategy? Can a toy company really become a gaming giant? Let me know in the comments.

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When was the last time you yelled “Uno!” across the dinner table? For me that was just a few days ago when I played a couple of rounds of the card game with my daughter. If it’s up to toy maker Mattel, we’ll all be shouting “Uno!” a lot more soon - while playing on our mobile phones.

Mattel made a an important move two weeks when it announced that it had acquired the remaining 50% of its mobile gaming joint venture Mattel163 from NetEase. While the amount Mattel needed to spend ($159 million) pales in comparison to the overall revenue the company makes, it marks an important step in its transformation towards an immersive entertainment company.

“Our strategy isn’t Roblox. Our strategy is creator.” When Mattel VP Marcus Liassides said this, he wasn’t being clever. He was articulating something most legacy brands still haven’t figured out. Mattel’s gaming strategy isn’t about picking the hot platform of the moment and throwing money at it. It’s about understanding that gaming is no longer a channel. It’s infrastructure. And if you’re going to survive as a consumer brand in 2026, you better figure out how to make gaming integral to everything you do.

Mattel did. And the transformation from a struggling toy manufacturer to an IP-driven entertainment powerhouse is one of the most underappreciated strategic pivots in modern business. This isn’t a story about a company that “went digital.” It’s a story about a company that fundamentally reimagined what it sells, who it sells to, and how it captures value in a world where screens have replaced playrooms.

The Existential Crisis: Why Mattel Had to Change or Die

Let’s rewind to 2017. Mattel was a mess. The company was defined by its ability to design, manufacture, and distribute physical toys. That model worked great for seven decades. It stopped working when kids started spending more time on iPads than with action figures.

The numbers tell the story. Traditional retail was collapsing. Toys “R” Us filed for bankruptcy. Kids were choosing Fortnite over Fisher-Price. And Mattel’s leadership was churning through CEOs like they were disposable. The company was stuck in a death spiral: declining sales leading to cost cuts leading to less innovation leading to more declining sales.

More fundamentally, Mattel was operating under a fatal assumption: that it was a toy company that makes products. It wasn’t. It was a manager of franchises that happened to express those franchises as physical toys. That distinction might seem semantic. It’s not. It’s the difference between survival and obsolescence.

Enter Ynon Kreiz: The Media Executive Who Saw What Others Missed

When Ynon Kreiz became CEO in April 2018, he brought something Mattel desperately needed: a media perspective. Kreiz had run Maker Studios and Endemol Group. He understood that in the modern entertainment landscape, IP is currency. Distribution is table stakes. And the companies that win are the ones that can take a single franchise and stretch it across every possible medium where audiences live.

Kreiz looked at Mattel’s portfolio and saw what Wall Street couldn’t: Barbie, Hot Wheels, Fisher-Price, and Monster High weren’t declining toy lines. They were under-monetized entertainment franchises with decades of cultural equity and virtually no digital presence. The opportunity was staggering. The execution would be brutal.

The strategic pivot was clear. Mattel would stop being a manufacturing company and become an IP management company. Film, television, live events, music, and critically, digital gaming would become core pillars. Not nice-to-haves. Not experimental side projects. Core revenue drivers with dedicated investment and world-class execution.

Phase I: The Mobile Foundation (2018-2020)

Kreiz’s first move was the least sexy but most important: establish a beachhead in mobile gaming. In early 2018, Mattel formed a 50/50 joint venture with NetEase called Mattel163. The logic was simple. NetEase had world-class mobile development and publishing capabilities. Mattel had iconic card and board game IP that translated naturally to mobile. Together, they could build a portfolio that generated high-margin recurring revenue.

The results were immediate and dramatic. Uno! Mobile launched in 2018 and became a phenomenon. Not because it was innovative. Because it was Uno, executed flawlessly, available everywhere, with live-service mechanics that kept players coming back. Phase 10 and Skip-Bo followed, building out the casual card game vertical.

By 2020, Mattel163 had achieved 600% revenue growth. The joint venture attracted 20 million monthly active users and generated over 550 million downloads. More importantly, it proved that Mattel’s IP had digital elasticity. These weren’t just nostalgic adults playing digital versions of physical games. These were global audiences engaging with Mattel brands in new contexts.

The financial implications were profound. Mobile gaming offered significantly higher operating margins than physical toy manufacturing. It was less capital intensive. It wasn’t subject to seasonal fluctuations. And it provided first-party data that Mattel had never had access to in the traditional retail model. By 2022, Mattel163 was generating over $175 million in annual revenue and climbing.

Phase II: High-Fidelity Gaming and the Kidult Demographic (2021-2022)

Mobile established the floor. But to reach the “kidult” demographic, adult collectors and core gamers with nostalgic connections to Mattel brands, the company needed high-fidelity console and PC experiences. That meant partnering with real game developers who understood how to build premium titles.

In February 2021, Mattel announced a partnership with Milestone to create Hot Wheels Unleashed. This wasn’t a licensed cash-grab. This was a serious arcade racing game built in Unreal Engine with the production values to compete with established franchises. The game recreated the experience of racing die-cast cars on iconic orange plastic tracks, complete with a track builder and livery editor that let players customize everything.

The commercial success exceeded expectations. Hot Wheels Unleashed reached 1 million copies sold by December 2021, becoming the fastest-selling game in Milestone’s history. By April 2023, it had surpassed 2 million units sold and registered over 8 million players across all platforms, bolstered by inclusion in Xbox Game Pass and PlayStation Plus. The user community created over 1 million custom car designs and 350,000 original tracks.

This validated Kreiz’s strategy of working with world-class partners. Mattel didn’t need to build game studios from scratch. It needed to find the right developers for each franchise and ensure they had the resources and creative freedom to deliver quality. Hot Wheels Unleashed proved that toy-based games could be critically acclaimed and commercially successful when executed properly.

Phase III: The Barbie Phenomenon (2023-2024)

Then came 2023. The Barbie movie wasn’t just a box office success. It was the ultimate proof-of-concept for the “Barbie Playbook”, Mattel’s coordinated strategy to use major media events to drive engagement across every channel simultaneously.

The gaming component was critical. Mattel partnered with Gamefam to launch Barbie DreamHouse Tycoon on Roblox. The experience was designed to mirror the “Barbie Land” aesthetics of the film while using the popular tycoon mechanic where players build and manage their own environments.

The performance was staggering. Barbie DreamHouse Tycoon recorded over 3 million unique visits during beta. Following the official launch and strategic marketing tied to the movie release, the experience surpassed 29 million lifetime visits in weeks, eventually reaching close to 500 million visits. Players spent hours per session, with some reporting four-hour sessions to complete their DreamHouse builds.

This wasn’t just about reach. It was about understanding platform fit. Roblox’s user base skewed heavily toward Gen Z and Gen Alpha, exactly the audience Mattel needed to capture to secure its future. By creating an experience that felt native to Roblox while staying true to Barbie’s core play pattern of roleplaying and customization, Mattel demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of how IP translates across platforms.

The halo effect was immediate. Worldwide gross billings for the Dolls category surged by 29% in Q4 2023, driven by growth in Barbie, Disney Princess, and Monster High. More importantly, the digital-first engagement created a feedback loop. Data from the Roblox experience informed physical toy development, marketing strategies, and content creation. Mattel could now see in real-time which rooms, outfits, and activities resonated most with users.

But Mattel didn’t stop at Roblox. The company partnered with Xbox for a comprehensive Barbie campaign that included adding the pink 1956 Chevrolet Corvette and Ken’s 2022 GMC Hummer EV to Forza Horizon 5, creating custom Barbie DreamHouse-themed Xbox Series S consoles, and launching fashion-inspired controller faceplates. The integration was everywhere.

Phase IV: Full Control and the Shift to Self-Publishing (2025-2026)

By 2025, Mattel’s gaming strategy had matured to the point where the company sought greater operational control. The partnership model had worked. But partnerships mean sharing profits, sharing data, and compromising on strategic alignment.

On February 10, 2026, Mattel announced it would acquire NetEase’s 50% stake in Mattel163 for $159 million, valuing the total entity at $318 million. This was a watershed moment. By taking full ownership, Mattel would retain 100% of profits from titles like Uno! and Phase 10. More importantly, it brought several hundred specialized mobile game developers and digital marketing experts directly into the Mattel organization.

The acquisition was capital efficient. More than half of the purchase price was funded using Mattel’s existing share of the joint venture’s cash reserves. And the strategic rationale was clear: full control allowed Mattel to align digital game releases more closely with its broader product roadmap and theatrical slate, including the upcoming Masters of the Universe film.

In tandem with the acquisition, Mattel announced plans to become a first-party publisher, with its first two self-published mobile titles launching in 2026. This marked the completion of the transformation from licensing partner to active participant to full owner of its gaming destiny.

Mattel also deepened its commitment to user-generated content platforms. In October 2025, the company expanded its Roblox partnership to introduce a new slate of standalone titles, starting with a major Monster High experience. But the real innovation was the Roblox License Manager, which allowed independent developers to pitch and create officially licensed experiences using Mattel assets.

This was a radical shift in corporate IP philosophy. Historically, large corporations protect their trademarks zealously. Mattel chose to democratize its IP, turning millions of Roblox creators into an extension of its development team. By providing official assets through a centralized oversight system, Mattel scaled its digital footprint while maintaining brand integrity.

The Financial Transformation: From Manufacturing to High-Margin Media

The impact on Mattel’s financial profile has been profound. While net sales have remained relatively stable (around $5.4-5.5 billion from 2021-2024), the revenue mix has shifted dramatically toward high-margin digital income.

Mattel163 consistently exceeded targets, reaching over $200 million in revenue by 2024. Analysts estimated the fully-owned entity would contribute approximately $150 million in net sales in its first partial year of consolidation in 2026. More importantly, the gross margin story tells the tale. Mattel’s adjusted gross margin reached 50.9% in 2024, the strongest level in the company’s recent history. Digital gaming’s high-margin nature is a primary driver.

This matters because it changes the investment thesis. Mattel is no longer purely a manufacturing company subject to inventory risk and seasonal volatility. It’s a diversified entertainment company with recurring digital revenue streams that compound over time.

The Strategic Framework: What Mattel Got Right

Looking across the eight-year transformation, several strategic principles emerge that other legacy brands should study.

Platform Agnostic, Not Platform Dependent

When Marc Liassides said “our strategy is creator,” he was articulating a fundamental insight. Mattel doesn’t build for Roblox or Fortnite or mobile. It builds for wherever its audience is, using whatever platform best serves the core play pattern of each franchise. Barbie is about roleplaying and customization, so it thrives on Roblox. Hot Wheels is about speed and competition, so it thrives on console racing games. This platform flexibility prevents Mattel from being held hostage to any single distribution channel.

World-Class Partners Over In-House Hubris

Mattel recognized early that building game studios from scratch would be slow and expensive. Instead, it partnered with best-in-class developers: NetEase for mobile, Milestone for racing, Gamefam for UGC platforms. This allowed Mattel to move fast and learn from experts while maintaining creative control over how its IP was expressed.

Data-Driven Feedback Loops

The shift to digital gaming provided Mattel with unprecedented first-party data. Through games like Barbie DreamHouse Tycoon, the company can track precisely which elements resonate with users. This data now informs physical toy development, creating a virtuous cycle where digital engagement drives physical sales and vice versa.

The Barbie Playbook: Coordinated Transmedia Execution

The 2023 Barbie movie campaign demonstrated the power of synchronized execution across all channels. Film, gaming, physical products, and partnerships launched in coordinated waves that created cultural momentum. This wasn’t siloed marketing. It was orchestrated IP management where each channel amplified the others.

The Risks and What Could Still Go Wrong

Despite the progress, Mattel faces real challenges. In early 2026, the stock plummeted over 30% following a lackluster Q4 2025 report where revenue and earnings missed analyst estimates. This volatility underscores the high stakes of the transformation. Investors worry that weak performance in the traditional toy business can’t yet be fully offset by digital gains.

There’s also execution risk. Becoming a first-party publisher is hard. Mobile game publishing is brutally competitive. User acquisition costs are rising. The App Store top charts require $150 million just to break into the top 10 and $1 billion to stay there, according to Boston Consulting Group. Mattel plans to invest approximately $40 million in performance-based marketing for its digital games in 2026. That’s significant, but it may not be enough in a market where scale determines winners.

The UGC platform strategy also carries risk. By democratizing its IP through the Roblox License Manager, Mattel gains scale but loses some control. Quality varies. Brand safety becomes harder to manage. And if platforms like Roblox or Fortnite change their terms or lose relevance, Mattel’s investments could be stranded.

What This Means for Every Other Legacy Brand

Mattel’s transformation isn’t just a toy story. It’s the blueprint for how legacy consumer brands survive the shift to digital. The lessons are clear.

First, recognize that you’re not in the product business. You’re in the IP management business. Your brands have value beyond the physical goods you manufacture. The question is whether you’ll capture that value or let platforms and licensees take it.

Second, gaming isn’t a marketing channel. It’s infrastructure. If your customers, especially young ones, spend hours per day in gaming environments, you need a presence there that’s as sophisticated as your retail strategy. That means dedicated teams, real investment, and world-class execution.

Third, platform flexibility is survival. Don’t bet everything on one platform. Build a portfolio approach where you meet audiences wherever they are with experiences tailored to each environment’s unique characteristics.

Fourth, data is the moat. The real value of digital gaming isn’t just revenue. It’s the first-party data that creates feedback loops between digital and physical, allowing you to build better products and market more efficiently.

The Next Chapter

Mattel’s transformation from toy maker to entertainment company is far from complete. The company still generates the majority of its revenue from physical products. The digital segment, while growing, isn’t yet large enough to carry the business on its own. And the market remains skeptical, as evidenced by the stock volatility.

But the fundamentals are sound. Record gross margins. A massive digital player base across mobile, console, and UGC platforms. A robust pipeline of theatrical content (14 films in development) designed to create coordinated gaming moments. And most importantly, an organizational mindset that no longer sees plastic and pixels as separate categories but as different expressions of the same underlying franchises.

When Ynon Kreiz took over in 2018, Mattel was a manufacturing company in crisis. Eight years later, it’s an entertainment company with a gaming problem to solve: how to scale digital revenue fast enough to offset structural declines in traditional retail. The 2026 acquisition of Mattel163 and the shift to self-publishing suggest the company is serious about solving it.

Whether Mattel fully succeeds remains to be seen. But the strategy is right. The execution has been strong. And for every other legacy brand watching from the sidelines, wondering if they should “do gaming,” Mattel has provided the answer: you don’t have a choice. The only question is whether you’ll do it strategically or desperately.

Is your brand taking gaming seriously enough? Let me know in the comments.

We’ll be dissecting the transformational strategies of other brands and companies that use video games to future proof their businesses in upcoming posts. If there’s a company you think needs to be on our list, let us know below!

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I just got off the stage in Zurich at the Innovation Finanzplatz Schweiz Conference 2026 where I gave the keynote to Switzerland’s top 200 bankers on why gaming is essential for financial service providers in the context of modern day consumer touch points and engagement. I’m pretty sure I was the only non-banking person at the entire conference.

While it’s clear that this industry has some catching up to do, I was positively surprised by both the amount and the vigour of the head-nodding I received from the audience.

Financial institutions face two crucial challenges with respect to engaging their customers. First, the vast majority of their interactions with their customers are purely transactional (you check the balance on your account and you move on), which results in a vast distance between service provider and consumer. Second, younger audiences, the banks’ future customers, don’t go into the city to open a bank account in a physical branch. They don’t just live online, they live in video games predominantly.

Yet, the banking industry has a great example to look up to. Mastercard entered video gaming in 2012 already. When I interviewed Mastercard’s CMO Raja Rajamannar for my book Press Play, the strategic importance of gaming for the company became clear immediately: it’s an always-on initiative that sits right next to all other channels in terms of importance.

I’m confident we’ll see more financial service providers take the leap and adopt gaming in different ways. Fintech darling Revolut is already rumored to be looking into acquisitions in the gaming space to unlock customer acquisition for them.

There’ll undoubtedly be a steep learning curve ahead of them, which brings us to this week’s post.

The Numbers Don’t Lie: Brands Are Retreating

According to GEEIQ’s upcoming State of Brands in Virtual Worlds 2026 report, something remarkable happened in 2025. For the first time ever, the total number of brand integrations inside experiences on Roblox, Fortnite and other user-generated content platforms exceeded the number of active brand-owned worlds. Between January and December of last year, brands launched 335 integrations and just 252 owned worlds, marking a 57% year-over-year decrease in brand-owned worlds and a 14% increase in integrations.

This isn’t just new brands choosing a different path. It’s an active retreat. GEEIQ found that 31% of brands that launched an integration in 2025 had previously built a brand-owned experience. They tried ownership. They’re walking away from it.

GEEIQ CEO Charles Hambro frames this as a structural change:

“Brands that entered virtual worlds 2-4 years ago went in for hype, and it was still novel to have branded worlds, regardless of how much it cost to build and maintain one. Over time, the novelty wore off, it became harder to build an audience from the ground up without significant marketing budgets to amplify it, and ultimately, brands needed more tangible results they could measure to justify this investment.”

He’s right, but the story is more complicated than brands simply getting smarter. This shift reveals both hard truths about gaming and dangerous misconceptions that could leave brands worse off than before.

Why the Shift Is Happening: The Hard Truths

The Elephant in the Room: Making Games Is Brutally Hard

Let’s start with the obvious reality too many CMOs ignored when they greenlit their first Roblox world. Making games is hard. Not marketing-campaign-hard. Actually, genuinely, technically difficult in ways that most consumer brands have zero competency in.

Look at Disney. One of the best storytelling companies on the planet. Thirty years of attempts to crack gaming. Billions invested. Studios opened, shuttered, reopened. And to this day, the most successful Disney game based on Disney IP wasn’t made by Disney. It was made by a third-party developer called Second Dinner, for which Disney merely licensed its Marvel characters to create Marvel Snap.

If Disney struggles this much with gaming, what chance does a CPG brand or fashion label have building a game from scratch, maintaining it, and consistently seeing great results? The answer is borderline delusional confidence mixed with fundamental misunderstanding of what game development requires.

The Metrics Aren’t There, Part 1: Measurement Solutions Are Still Makeshift

Even if you somehow build a decent game or world, justifying the investment to your CFO becomes the next impossible task. According to brand executives I’ve spoken with privately, measurement and tracking solutions on platforms like Roblox and Fortnite have improved but still feel makeshift and cobbled together.

To justify the increased costs that operating live games requires, platforms need transparent and reliable measurement across the entire funnel. CMOs need to demonstrate ROI to finance departments. When the tools to do that are underwhelming, the business case for owned worlds collapses.

The Metrics Aren’t There, Part 2: The Numbers Were Just Bad

And assuming sufficient tracking was in place, maybe the metrics were just bad. Engagement tapered off quickly. Retention was low. After a quick brand awareness spike, there was no sustained impact.

A key reason: brands make it about themselves. You have to make it about the players and their experience. Always start with the audience and their needs. Make sure your brand values deliver against those user needs in a way that’s natural to the gaming environment you’re entering.

That’s the recipe for authentic experiences. If you don’t do that, the metrics won’t be there. And when the metrics aren’t there, the CFO pulls the plug.

Ramping Up: Harder to Scale From Scratch

Though it’s easier to attract players on platforms like Roblox or Fortnite compared to launching a new mobile game, building an audience from zero remains a massive challenge. The clear benefit to integrating with an existing game is that the audience is already there. Distribution and reaching critical mass become dramatically easier.

When Universal Pictures’ “How to Train Your Dragon” Roblox experience became the most-visited persistent branded world in 2025 by over 30 million visits, it proved something important. Entertainment IP with existing fandom can succeed with owned worlds. But for brands without that built-in audience? Integration starts looking a lot more attractive.

The Dangers of Overcorrecting: Why Integrations Aren’t Perfect

The conventional wisdom around this shift gets dangerous. Yes, integrations solve real problems. But treating them as the default strategy for all brands creates new pitfalls that CMOs need to understand.

Treating Games as Just Another Advertising Channel

The easiest trap: pick an existing world, slap your brand logo on it, report brand awareness lift, call it a day. It’s the easy way to tick the box on your gaming initiative.

But brands that treat games as simply another advertising channel miss out on all the downstream revenue potential games offer. Commerce integration. Loyalty programs. Data capture. Community building. Direct customer relationships. These opportunities exist when you control the experience. They disappear when you’re just buying a billboard inside someone else’s world.

Losing Creative Control: You Can’t Shape What You Don’t Own

When you build a new game or world, you can craft it exactly to what you want it to be. You control the narrative, the mechanics, the user journey, the data architecture, everything. When you integrate with an existing game, you have to live with the design confines of what exists and operate within that.

This matters more than most CMOs realize. Your brand might have specific storytelling needs. Your product might require specific mechanics to demonstrate properly. Your compliance team might have requirements about data collection. In an owned world, you accommodate all of this. In an integration, you’re at the mercy of the host experience.

The Authenticity Paradox: Choose Carefully or Fail Quietly

Picking the right game or world for your brand is incredibly hard. GEEIQ’s data shows brands are making the shift to integrations, but it doesn’t show whether those integrations are performing well. Based on conversations with developers and brand strategists, many aren’t.

Here’s the problem: brands aren’t doing the hard work of understanding their audience beyond “we want to engage young people.” That’s not strategy. That’s lazy. Picking the right game where your target audience is overwhelmingly present, where your brand values align naturally with the game’s themes, where your integration adds genuine value to players’ experience, that’s the work.

Hambro gets this right:

“With integrations being the new standard, brands should try to work closely with creators or at least ensure they’re included in the conversations early on. They’re not just a distribution channel, but they need to be a core part of the infrastructure. They are the experts on their own platforms, they know what their players like and what they don’t.”

That’s the key. But how many brands are actually doing this versus treating creators as just another vendor?

What Smart Brands Should Actually Do

The GEEIQ data doesn’t reveal that integrations are better than owned worlds. It reveals that most brands executed owned worlds poorly, and integrations offer a less risky way to stay in the game while learning.

The brands that will actually win in gaming over the next five years won’t be the ones blindly following the integration trend. They’ll be the ones that understand when to own and when to integrate based on their specific objectives, capabilities, and audience.

Own when you have entertainment IP with existing fandom, need full creative control, can commit to always-on operations, need proprietary data and direct customer relationships, or are willing to invest in serious user acquisition. Ultimately, I’m convinced more and more brands beyond entertainment IP owners will own their own games and worlds, but it may not be their immediate starting point.

Integrate when you’re entering gaming for the first time, your primary goal is brand awareness and reach, you have limited budget for ongoing operations, you’ve found a game where your target audience is already engaged, or you can genuinely add value to players’ existing experience. There’s a reason why integrating in existing games is the first strategy I recommend in my book: it’s easier to do, faster, cheaper, and most importantly: brands can learn, gain insight, and iterate from there.

The Best Strategy: Do Both Strategically

The most sophisticated brands like Adidas aren’t choosing one or the other. They integrate to learn, experiment, and reach new audiences quickly. They build owned experiences where it makes strategic sense and where they can commit real resources.

Mastercard’s approach is instructive. Raja Rajamannar describes gaming as an always-on initiative that sits next to all other channels. That’s not an integration strategy or an owned-world strategy. That’s gaming-as-infrastructure where different tactics serve different objectives within a cohesive whole.

The Real Learning Curve Ahead

For the financial services providers I spoke to in Zurich, and for any brand looking at gaming strategically, the GEEIQ data should be a warning, not a roadmap.

Don’t build owned worlds just because it’s novel or because your competitor did it. Don’t assume you can build a game without deep gaming expertise. Don’t launch without clear success metrics and infrastructure to measure them.

But also don’t assume integrations are the magic solution. Don’t treat games as just another advertising channel. Don’t skip the hard work of finding authentic fit between your brand and the gaming experience.

The brands that entered gaming 2-4 years ago went in for hype. Many are now retreating. The brands that enter now have the benefit of their expensive lessons. The question is whether they’ll actually learn from them.

The shift from owned worlds to integrations isn’t brands getting smarter. It’s brands getting more cautious. Smart would be understanding that gaming strategy requires the right approach for the right objective at the right time. Nostalgia isn’t strategy. But neither is chasing the latest trend without understanding why the previous one failed.

How is your brand approaching gaming strategy? Let me know in the comments.

Earnings season is in full swing and we have had Take-Two, EA, and Disney all report their latest financials already. Subscribe today to get the latest insights on what’s brewing at the top entertainment companies and how these shifts spill over into other industries.

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The World Economic Forum in Davos last week delivered one of the most remarkable gatherings of the world’s elite and most powerful in decades. The stakes were so high that even Elon Musk, who for years has openly defied and mocked the event in the Swiss Alps, made a last minute appearance to do a fireside chat with BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.

Amid all the geopolitical tensions and tantrums, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a speech for the ages. What many didn’t notice was that the former banker delivered one of the soundest pieces of business advice.

Carney referred to the evolving relationships within the Western alliance and that reminiscing about, maybe even clinging to, the past partnership with the US isn’t going to be helpful going forward. It’s not a strategy. The tides have turned. Which means new strategies need to be crafted and deployed.

Carney might as well have been talking about two of the culturally most important industries, entertainment and gaming, when he uttered those five words. The deadly cocktail of reaching backwards, hoping to hold on to the comfort of the past and the known, mixed with a few ounces of Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma, where even some of the best companies fail to adapt to disruptive technologies only to be disrupted themselves, is on full display across the Hollywood and video gaming landscape.

Hollywood’s Streaming Denial: Blaming Netflix for Their Own Complacency

Hollywood is so concerned with condemning Netflix and blaming its own demise on the streaming giant that executives are forgetting to take a hard look in the mirror. Netflix only happened because Hollywood’s giants didn’t do it first. Classic Innovator’s Dilemma and complacency. Why change what’s working well (for us)?

They’re now paying the price. The writing has been on the wall for a long time. Hollywood execs will claim that Netflix killed the movie theater experience. Netflix didn’t do any of that. Consumer behavior changed.

Movie theater attendance in the U.S. over the past five years has experienced a volatile, slow recovery from pandemic-era shutdowns, remaining significantly below pre-2019 historical norms. While 2025 showed a strong, younger-skewing audience, overall admissions for 2025 are estimated at 780 million, a slight decrease of 4.9% from 2024 and still well below the over 1.2 billion tickets sold in 2019.

The trend is unmistakable. Theater attendance has been cut nearly in half since 2019, and it’s not recovering. Yet Hollywood executives continue to operate as if 2019 is coming back. It’s not. Consumers have fundamentally changed how they want to consume entertainment. They want flexibility. They want to watch on their schedule, on their devices, in their homes. The theatrical window isn’t sacred anymore. It’s a relic that still has its occasional moment.

The incumbents were simply too complacent to see what was going on and acknowledge a fundamental shift in their industry that would impact their precious business model. They chose nostalgia over reinvention.

Hollywood’s Next Nostalgia Moment: Artificial Intelligence

Now, Hollywood is facing its next nostalgia moment: AI. The use of AI will impact Hollywood production across the board. Sound, storytelling, visual effects, post-production. The list goes on.

The response from the industry? Lawsuits, strikes, and defensive posturing. The Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild fought hard in 2023 negotiations to restrict AI use. Studios are being sued for training models on copyrighted content. Executives are publicly dismissing AI as a fad that will never replace human creativity.

But here’s the reality: AI is already embedded in Hollywood production pipelines. Visual effects houses are using AI for rotoscoping, color grading, and asset generation. Music supervisors are using AI to generate placeholder scores. Post-production teams are using AI to clean audio and speed up editing workflows. The question isn’t whether AI will be used. It’s who will control it and benefit from it.

Yes, there are real risks here and we need to make sure we protect IP, respect copyright and trademarks, and work with the talent that is there to allow them to level up and do a better job than before using AI, rather than aim for outright replacing people. Yes, there will be impact and it will likely be significant.

But looking to the past and desperately trying to preserve what once was, hoping the imminent change will subside, is naive at best and a terrible strategy that will doom your company at worst. The studios that figure out how to integrate AI responsibly, how to augment human creativity rather than replace it, and how to use AI to reduce costs without sacrificing quality will be the ones that survive. The ones clinging to 20th century production models will be the next Blockbuster Video.

Gaming’s Creative Purity Myth: When Art Meets Market Reality

Gaming purists like to shout it from the rooftops that games are an art form and if commercial interests become too dominant, it’s no longer a real video game and almost outright evil. I’ve been subject to a few messages claiming that I don’t understand gaming because I see the shift towards brands coming into this space in order to reach and engage new audiences and advocate for embracing this shift.

Let me be clear: games are absolutely an art form. But art doesn’t pay the bills. And if your studio can’t keep the lights on and you can’t feed your family, then what are you doing?

What has worked 20-30 years ago to make a game successful is no longer working and hasn’t for the past decade. Some of the most prominent and iconic game designers of the industry, like Raph Koster, start new game projects thinking about the business model first. Not because they don’t care about the art. Because they understand that sustainable art requires sustainable business.

The romantic notion that “if you build a great game, players will come” died in the 2010s. That worked 30 years ago when there were hundreds of games released per year. Now there are tens of thousands. The App Store alone sees over 1,000 new game releases every single day. Quality is table stakes. Discovery is the actual challenge.

The AI Paradox: Easier to Build, Harder to Win

The gaming industry is experiencing a profound paradox driven by AI. Production has never been easier. Standing out has never been harder.

AI has democratized game development and creative production, enabling any studio to generate code, mechanics, and assets at AAA speed. Small teams can now produce what would have taken large studios months to create. The result: more games reaching market faster, flooding acquisition channels with creative variations and shifting the bottleneck from production capability to marketing excellence.

The data in AppsFlyer’s latest report tells the story. In 2025, we saw a 10% paid install share increase year-over-year while ad impressions surged 20%, revealing AI’s dual impact on gaming channels. Total gaming user acquisition spend hit $25 billion in 2025, with roughly 50% flowing into the U.S. alone. However, U.S. budgets actually dropped 5% year-over-year as high costs and competition made incremental scale harder to justify. Meanwhile, spend increased 29% in Turkey and 19% in India.

The creative production arms race is intensifying. Top gaming spenders now produce 2,400 to 2,600 creative variations per quarter, up 25-30% year-over-year. Creative performance remains a numbers game where finding winners is increasingly difficult. Smaller advertisers (under $500K annual spend) scaled output 20-40% year-over-year just to compete. Lower mid-tier advertisers ($0.5M to $1M) showed flat or declining volume, while upper mid-tier ($1M to $4M) maintained scale like top spenders. Testing velocity now determines competitive advantage.

The market is also polarizing geographically. 66% of iOS in-app purchase revenue comes from Western countries, while emerging markets drive in-app advertising growth. Western countries dominate IAP with 55% on Android and 66% on iOS, with the U.S. alone commanding 45% of iOS spend. Emerging markets show rapid IAA expansion, with Turkey rising 25% across all genres. The split highlights market polarization between high-spending Western IAP hubs and ad-supported growth markets.

The Real Bottleneck: Marketing Is Now the Competitive Moat

The paradox is clear. AI makes it easier to build and create, but exponentially harder to stand out. The production problem is largely solved, but the attention problem has intensified. Gaming as an industry has quickly matured and marketing is now a true competitive advantage.

An internal analysis by Boston Consulting Group revealed that it takes roughly $150 million in user acquisition spend to break into the top 10 mobile games on the app stores and roughly $1 billion in forward-looking spend to stay there.

Read that again. $150 million just to get in. $1 billion to stay. This isn’t a creative problem. It’s a capital problem. And it’s why indie developers building “pure” games without monetization strategies or marketing budgets are increasingly irrelevant in the mobile market.

The gaming purists who rail against brands entering gaming spaces are fundamentally misunderstanding what’s happening. Brands aren’t corrupting gaming. They’re becoming essential partners for studios that need distribution and marketing firepower. When it costs $150 million to break into the top charts, partnering with a brand that brings its own audience, marketing budget, and IP recognition isn’t selling out. It’s survival.

What Strategy Actually Looks Like

So what does strategy look like in entertainment and gaming when nostalgia is off the table?

For Hollywood: Embrace AI as a production tool, not a threat. Invest in training talent to use AI to augment their work. Build workflows that use AI to reduce costs on routine tasks so budgets can focus on creative excellence. Stop pretending theatrical windows are sacred and build distribution models around how audiences actually consume content. Partner with platforms instead of fighting them.

For Gaming: Accept that marketing is now the moat and build accordingly. Think about business models from day one, not as an afterthought. Embrace brand partnerships as distribution channels. Use AI to scale creative production and testing velocity. Understand that being in the top 10 requires capital and infrastructure, not just great gameplay.

For Both: Stop looking backward. The markets have fundamentally changed. Consumer behavior has fundamentally changed. Technology has fundamentally changed. The companies that win won’t be the ones preserving the past. They’ll be the ones bold enough to build for the future that’s already here.

The Choice Is Clear

Mark Carney’s five words apply far beyond geopolitics. They apply to every industry facing disruption. Nostalgia isn’t strategy. It’s the opposite of strategy. It’s the comfortable delusion that if we just hold on long enough, things will go back to how they were.

Hollywood isn’t going back to 1.2 billion theatrical admissions.

Gaming isn’t going back to a world where great gameplay alone guarantees success.

AI isn’t going away.

Consumer behavior isn’t reverting.

The choice is simple. Adapt or die. Build for the future or cling to the past. The companies choosing nostalgia are writing their own obituaries. The ones choosing strategy are writing the next chapter of their industries.

Which side of history will you be on?

What’s your take? Is nostalgia holding back your industry? Are you witnessing complacency in your company? Let me know in the comments.

Gain valuable insight into strategies the most successful companies are deploying across the entertainment and gaming space, as well as understand their playbooks to navigate the changes driven by AI and evolving consumer behavior. Subscribe to Technically Entertaining today. Make sounder decisions for your business tomorrow.

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